SOGETSU MELBOURNE WORKSHOPS: part two.

To continue last week's theme, the second day of workshops on Sunday 23rd August with Mr Umemura from Sydney were again focusing on two Sogetsu curriculum exercises combined. The morning workshop was combining the following two exercises: 'Kabuwake' (two or more groups of material), and 'using branch material only'. Branch material can include flowers that occur on the branches.


I decided to use again some of the prunings from the apricot tree, that had started to flower after being placed in a vase, with Japanese flowering quince and some camellia leaves. The apricot provided wide sweeping lines that the quince leaned into. While the camellia concealed the kenzans and provided a small mass high in the arrangement.

The afternoon workshop combined the themes, 'using two or more vessels' and 'using only one kind of material'. This second part, 'one kind of material', is made a little easier when the material chosen has very distinctive elements, such as contrasting flowers, leaves, stems or seed pods, for example.


I had only a little of my camellia left. However, I was able to make a freestyle nageire arrangement, in the tall vase, and float a single flower in the bowl. This enabled me to make a feature of the surface of the water, thus creating an additional element to the composition.

Examples of Mr Umemura's and my colleagues' work can be seen by clicking on Sunday workshops * .

Greetings from Christopher
12th September 2015

1 comment:

  1. Loved taking Mr. Umemura's Workshops when I was in Melbourne. Very talented teacher. Thanks, Christopher, for sharing his, your and your workshop companions' work. Very challenging assignments and quite well executed.

    ReplyDelete