Since I’ve never worked with fruits and/or vegetables before, I went over to Tsunakawa-sensei’s place on Tuesday evening to try my hand at a “free style” arrangement using those materials as a practice before the workshop tomorrow.
The materials in question in this arrangement are asparagus, radish, and lettuce. The radish was actually Tim’s idea when I told him I wasn’t sure what I should use for “colour”.
As you can see from the photo, some of the asparagus are kind of drooping down. It seems that the weight of the radish was a bit much for them but you get the idea anyway. Class was over by then and I didn’t really want to bother cutting and readjusting them. Now I was originally only going to have one asparagus with the radish topping but sensei suggested I should make all my asparagus have radish on top of them. One of my other ideas was to put the lettuce onto the asparagus so that it would look like an umbrella or a branch with some leaves on it…but that didn’t work out at all.
Everything inside the suiban was pretty much my own work but it was sensei who opted to put more lettuce outside of the container and the other lone radish outside. She also bent the asparagus more to the front. The idea she wanted to go for was for the arrangement’s “energy” to go out of the container by having the lettuce flow outside very casually and the asparagus leaning towards the viewer.
So there were two things I “learned” on Tuesday. The first was to remember that just because I’m doing a moribana doesn’t necessarily mean that all your materials have to be attached to the kenzan. My original arrangement was like that but sensei came over and started placing the lettuce directly in the water. The other thing is what I mentioned above where sensei placed the materials completely outside the container, which is an extension of my first point. Just because I have a suiban doesn’t mean the materials have to go inside it. The arrangement can (and sometimes should) extend beyond the container! :O Sensei mentioned exactly that with Okubo-sensei’s arrangement on Sunday but I had completely forgotten about it. :(
Anyway, sensei actually called me yesterday suggesting I incorporate celery into my arrangement tomorrow since it’s “stronger” than asparagus. Though, I’m not really sure it’s going to work well due to its concave shape. I don’t think I can stick a radish onto a celery like I can with an asparagus. I think you could however go for a see-saw arrangement with the celery and radish though that might be a little too abstract for me. In any case, the workshop won’t be until 1430 tomorrow so I still have plenty of time available for brainstorming arrangement ideas.
