What I make is haiga, and the two halves of it came to me from opposite ends of the earth.
The word came from Iowa.
There is a real line of haiku running through the small college where I studied — Loras, in Dubuque — beginning with the priest-poet Raymond Roseliep, once called the John Donne of Western haiku. I arrived the year after he died and studied under his student and close friend Bill Pauly, the keeper of his workshop. Roseliep to Pauly to me: three of us, one small town, the same stubborn discipline passed hand to hand.
The image came from Japan.
After Loras I spent five years there, teaching in the Osaka area. I learned to paint — not in Kyoto, where foreigners go looking for Japan, but in working Osaka, under a priest named Father Inoue, who taught me bokashi: the art of shading a color from full to pale so cleanly that no edge shows. In the spring of 1990 a few of my paintings hung in a Japanese-painting exhibition in Higashi-Osaka. I did not stay a painter. But I learned, from the inside, what it is to make an image by hand.
Haiga turned out to be the one form that needed exactly the two things I went so far to learn — the word and the image — and I have spent much of my life carrying them toward each other. I make the images now with MidJourney, and have worked with it since it first opened to the public in 2022.
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