The World in Miniature

The Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM) in Volunteer Park is a beautiful Art Deco building that served as the main Seattle Art Museum for decades until the new one was built in downtown Seattle in the 1990s. SAM downtown has recently been renovated and received over a billion dollars worth of new art bequests and donations, so naturally it receives most of the national and international attention, but SAAM, the sister museum in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood, is a real gem and always worth a visit. The setting of the park is wonderful; from Capitol Hill's main street, Broadway, the gay heart of the city, one meanders through narrow streets lined with grand and elegant Victorian homes to get there. Volunteer Park is a glorious urban retreat complete with walking trails, gorgeous views of the city and a lovely conservatory filled with thousands of species of plants.

Right next to the park is the gracious Lake View Cemetery, founded in 1873 and replete with late Victorian grave markers. Its greatest fame comes from being the final resting place of Bruce Lee and his son Brandon. During one visit to the cemetery several years ago, I came upon an Eastern European soccer team standing around his grave paying silent and serious homage, cigarettes and beer bottles in hand.

Last weekend my daughter and I made a special visit to SAAM to see an exhibition of watercolor paintings called "Garden & Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur." A traveling exhibition organized by the Smithsonian's Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, it first showed in Washington D.C., is in Seattle until April 26 and will move next to the British Museum from May 28 to August 23 and then to the National Museum of India in November. The exhibition was everything we'd hoped for: a large and exciting collection of 18th and 19th century paintings created for Indian royalty depicting maharajas, their homes and their wives and concubines; vast gardens filled with trees, flowers and animals; and dramatic tableaus featuring Hindu gods and holy men.

The level of detail was remarkable; impossibly detailed trees and saris were painted with infinitesimally fine lines and dots created with squirrel-tail brushes. Great care and love were lavished on works that included glorifications of Indian princes, paintings made in homage to particular gods, pieces created as aids to devotion and works created as visual histories or records of the grandeur of humans and deities alike. These paintings were never before displayed in public, and the sense of discovering something precious and jewel-like left almost unseen for so many years was thrilling.

I have always been a great fan of Indian miniature paintings with their tiny details, their lavish use of color and their energy and spirit. These paintings had all the elements of Indian miniatures, but were miniatures on a grand scale; that is, the scale of the detail in the paintings was the same as that found in miniature paintings, but these were expanded to fill pages of perhaps 15 by 30 inches rather than seven by nine, as one might expect for painting with this level of minuscule detail. The museum thoughtfully provided magnifying glasses to aid visitors in enjoying the works, many of which would be difficult for patrons with less than perfect vision to appreciate.

Being an artist who specializes in detailed, small-scale pieces, I have always been drawn to both admiring and creating works with a high degree of detail. In order to enjoy them, one must approach the works very closely and focus carefully; they require a level of intimacy unusual in fine art, and I love that. One has to get as close as possible to them to see what the artist wants us to see, until we're so close that the edges of the picture plane blur and disappear and we can imagine ourselves within that tiny world. They take greater effort to enjoy, but they pay back that effort with small surprises and hidden treasures.

This sort of care is usually lavished only on truly personal works of art, such as jewelry, which is worn on and warmed by the body, or in reliquaries holding relics of holy people (like saints) or things (like a piece of the "one true cross"), or in altars to Buddha or Hindu deities like my favorite, Ganesha, or in prayer books. The tradition of creating illuminated manuscripts has created similarly lavishly illustrated prayer books as aids to contemplation and devotion. Masterpieces of illumination like the Irish Book of Kells or the French Très Riches Heures de Jean, Duc de Berry are famous works of great art in their own right. And the art of illumination is not simply a Christian tradition; calligraphy is the premier art form of the Muslim world and one can find photos of thousands of exquisite illuminated pages from the Qur'an online; the Topkapi Palace collection is particularly fine. There are, of course, illuminated Jewish texts including versions of the Torah and the Haggadah as well, though sadly Jewish and Muslim manuscripts are rarely made mention of in Western books about the art of manuscript illumination.

Exquisite renderings of quotations from the Qur'an are an important element of Islamic art because of Islam's prohibition on illustrations featuring people or animals. The high degree of elegance and delicacy of detail in Muslim illuminated manuscripts and in decoration of mosques and other buildings in the Muslim comes largely from the necessity of perfecting the art of abstract illustration and a heavy reliance on the use of natural botanical forms as inspiration. Two years ago the Bellevue Arts Museum had an small but fine exhibition of works by contemporary Islamic calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya done in both classical and modern style.

The works in the "Gardens & Cosmos" exhibition feature tiny renderings of vast subjects, from gardens to palaces, from ocean to sky. It is ironic that such charmingly delicate illustrations can convey grand themes so beautifully.