kasumi　霞

KEY WORD :　architecture / general terms ; art history / paintings

1　A pattern representing mist, often stylized into shapes like the ideographs 工 or 王. It is used as a design for shelves, kasumidana 霞棚, and adapted to form various arrangements of horizontal elements such as the sash-bars on sliding screens, or battens on a bamboo fence, for example those at Kenninji 建仁寺. 2　Also ichimonji 一文字. A border. A long black cloth hung horizontally above a stage to hide light fittings and other equipment in the flies. Sometimes a series of such cloths are needed and in this case they are named according to their position, in order from the front of the stage to the back: daiichi ichimonji 第１一文字, daini ichimonji 第２一文字, and so on. 3　Mist depicted in various types of *yamato-e やまと絵 usually spreading horizontally in bands. Kasumi appears not only as a pictorial element but has definite functional purposes. In landscape painting, kasumi can divide the foreground, middle ground and background to create depth. In narrative painting, particularly in *emaki 絵巻, kasumi can suggest changes of scene and passage of time. In Heian style works, kasumi had a soft and transparent quality, lightly colored in indigo blue. From the 13c artists began to depict mist bands with a cleanly rounded head, often crisply outlined in white or black ink *sumi 墨. This kind of mist is called suyarigasumi すやり霞 or yarigasumi 槍霞, lit. spear mist, to differentiate it from the amorphous and translucent kasumi. The tendency for stylization and decorativeness accelerated from the Muromachi period, reaching a peak of resplendence in the Edo period when gold pigment and gold foil were used in abundance to depict mist and clouds (see *kinji 金地).

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