American Bonsai Society

Principles of Good Bonsai Design

By Robert Steven

Editor’s note: The following article was judged the best overall in the recent 2008 Art of Bonsai/Knowledge of Bonsai Article Contest. This revision has new photographs and illustrations from the original. In fact, it is now included in Robert’s new book, Mission of Transformation. ABS is pleased to offer our readers a glimpse into this wonderful follow up to Robert’s first book, Vision of My Soul.

Nature is a Masterpiece truly created by art and science…

I have been strongly influenced by the book  How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci  by Michael J. Gelb.This book describes the seven Da Vincian principles, curiosita, dimostrazione, sensazione, sfumato, arte/scienza, corporalita and connessione. The most impressive principle of these to me is arte/scienza, the development of balance between science and art, logic and imagination; it is a concept that requires thinking with the whole-brain. This concept can be incorporated into our daily life, including our creative thinking on bonsai design, in order to combine our artistic sense with scientific fact.

Imagine while you are learning to cook, you cook chicken curry and your wife comments that it does not taste as good as the one you had in the Indian restaurant last weekend. You know exactly what she means, yet you have no idea how to create the exact same taste, because you do not know what each ingredient does to the taste or how combinations of ingredients work together. Cookbooks are no help, as they all give different recipes of curry with no explanations as to the role each ingredient plays in the finished product. It is easy to say that whatever you cook, it must taste good; but to create a dish that tastes good, one must first learn what each ingredient adds to the taste and how multiple ingredients work together in order to create something that tastes good. Cooking is art as well, but it is also a science, the science of chemistry, in which we need to learn the contribution of each ingredient to specific tastes. This knowledge should be describable and learnable, even if one has intuitive cooking talent.

American Bonsai Society

Literati Style

A brief Exploration

By Will Heath

Like the style itself, the name used to describe it takes on many forms and the usage changes from region to region. The word Literati is used by many practitioners and is a Latin name originally attributed to the Japanese Bunjin due to the lack of an exact English equivalent. Bunjin is in turn a translation of the Chinese Wenjen, the word used in Chinese to denote those scholars who were practiced in the arts. I will not dive deeply into the long and varied history of the Wenjen or Bunjin style of bonsai or the history surrounding the scholars who created such after their break from traditional methods. I will also not explore in depth the style of painting which preceded the bonsai development into the style commonly called Literati.

There are already many detailed histories of the Literati, the Wenjen, Literati painting and Literati bonsai in publication, some which are listed as references and in the further reading notes at the end of this article. For the purposes of this article, I will briefly touch upon some important points