Seeing patterns, finding patterns and creating patterns by Soetsu Yanagi
...Intuition will produce knowledge, whereas knowledge rarely produces intuition...
There are many ways of seeing, but the truest and best is with intuition, for it takes in the whole, whereas the intellect only takes in a part. The pattern is born when one reproduces the intuitively perceived essence. When the intuition weakens, the pattern becomes no more than a formal design. Design as such is no more than an intellectual composition. The decay of this capacity of pattern-making today is due to a loss of the intuitive faculty.
The pattern is not a realistic depiction. It is a vision of what is reflected by intuition. It is a product of the imagination, in the sense in which William Blake used the word. The pattern is non-realistic. It may be called irrational. In a sense, it is an exaggeration. The pattern is not a scientific rendering of the original. Everyone knows that a bamboo grass pattern shows a that never could be. The pattern is the symbol of the plant, not the plant itself. It is an emblem of the bamboo, and yet the living bamboo is there in it.
The pattern contains the nature of nature.
The pattern is a summing-up of a view of nature.
On the whole, patterns tend towards symmetry. Symmetry is a natural and inevitable principle of the pattern, since it has its distant and profound origins in nature itself.
Real pattern is also the consequence of a series of technical processes.
Painting avoids patterns. The craftsman is essentially a community worker; when individualism arises, the paths of "artists" and "craftsmen" diverge.
In pattern, man gets a view of a mighty world transcending man. In pattern, we touch on the mystery of beauty. It is strange thing that nobody seems to have stated boldly that pattern and beauty are identical. To make something beautiful and to create a pattern are not two different things.
-some excerpts from the chapter "Pattern" by Soetsu Yanagi
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