I am watching a Curiosity Stream video on the history of the British Empire. While much of the empire was built on greed and violence, there are still some interesting, more peaceful, bits and pieces. One is the history of chintz, the fabric, as the narrator remarks, “you are used to seeing on your grandmother’s sofa.” However, as the owner of the small fabric studio in Bengal points out, that version of the fabric - machine printed - to which we can trace the etiology of the current word “chintzy” meaning cheap or kitsch, was the result of artisans creating fabric that would appeal to the taste of the newly arrived Brit traders.
However, if you move back to examples from the 16th and 17th centuries in Bengal, you discover wonderful hand-printed and hand-painted chintz fabric. The video then features an artisan carefully brushing color into very small spaces in the larger hand drawn design. “Very time-consuming, very labor intensive,” intones the narrator. “Been there, done that,” my inner voice responds. “And, yes, incredibly time consuming and labor intensive.” You can see some neat examples if you do a search on "16th century asian chintz."
I can truthfully say I was totally ignorant of this ancient ancestor of my own style of “image making.” But I find the idea comforting. I don’t think one can ever do anything completely “new” or “unique” in the arts. New technologies allow us to enhance or reconfigure image, sound, form, and modes of presentation or creation. Different perhaps, but more that “reconfiguration” than something really “new.” Still, every once in awhile, we stumble across the more original ancestors of our own imaginings. I suppose one could be chagrined - “Damn, I thought I was here first!” Far more in sync with the first tenet of Distilled Harmony - Foster Harmony - is “How cool is that! Someone has walked this path before me. I wonder what I can learn from them?”
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