Tiles and Pinstripes: The Green, Yellow and Red Stripe Grid
Two systems cross in this design, and the pattern is their treaty. Horizontally, bands of black divide the sheet into storeys, and in each storey sits a row of plump green tiles with rounded ends, like cushions, like roof tiles, like a course of masonry. Vertically, a completely different order runs through everything: fine pinstripes of red and gold, dozens of them, ignoring the bands and tiles entirely, stitching the whole surface together from top to bottom.
It is a page from the Shima Shima stripe books published in Kyoto by Shimbi Shoin in 1906, and of all the designs in the collection it is the most architectural, a pattern that behaves like a facade. The stripes of the book's title are here in force, but they have been put to structural work, and the result is less a decoration than a small building that happens to be made of cloth.
From the Collection
Green, Yellow, and Red Stripe Grid Japanese Edo Era Vintage Textile Print – Japanese Wall Art
A stripe grid pattern from the Shima Shima pattern books, Kyoto, 1906, in the Rinpa textile tradition.
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- Archival matte paper, 189 g/m², with pigment inks
- Unframed: 12″ × 18″, 20″ × 30″ or 24″ × 36″
- Framed in Black, Red Oak or White Ayous wood, ready to hang
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The Pattern Book Tradition
Patterns like this one were published in Kyoto by Shimbi Shoin in 1906, in the pattern books known generally as Shima Shima, shima being the Japanese word for stripes. The books belonged to a much older craft institution, the hinagata-bon, the pattern book from which kimono dyers and weavers worked, and to a distinguished artistic lineage: the Rinpa school, whose great Edo period master Ogata Korin had made bold, flattened natural pattern the height of Japanese design two centuries before. In the Meiji era the Kyoto designer Furuya Korin (1875 to 1910), a pupil of Kamisaka Sekka and a self declared Korin of the modern age, led the school's revival in print, issuing woodblock pattern books meant not as art for its own sake but as working designs for the textile trades. The Shima Shima books stand in that tradition: page after page of stripes, grids and lattices, each one a proposition a dyer could take to the loom or the stencil.
For the katazome dyer, a design of crossing systems was a display of registration skill: the horizontal bands and the green tiles could be dyed in one pass of work, the fine vertical pinstripes in another, and the two had to align perfectly over the full length of a kimono bolt. The pinstripes are the harder discipline. A line a hair off true shows instantly against the regular tiles, which is precisely why the pattern book offered it: a dyer who could hold these lines could hold anything.
Tiles, Storeys, Roofs
The green forms deserve their metaphors. Rounded end tiles cap the ridges and eaves of Japanese roofs, and rows of them are among the most familiar silhouettes in the Kyoto streetscape where these books were made; set in black bands, the green shapes carry some of that roofline rhythm into cloth. At the same time they read as cushions or as scales, a doubleness Japanese pattern delights in, one motif holding two references lightly and resolving into neither.
The color work is the design's warmth. Greens of several depths fill the tiles, the black bands give the structure its shadow, and the red and gold pinstripes run like late light through the whole, a sunset caught in a grid. Where the square mesh design in the same book is cool and contemplative, this page is festive, the richest of the stripe designs, Meiji Kyoto dressing in its full palette.
The Fullest Page
Set the five Shima Shima designs in a row and this one closes the argument with the fullest surface of the set: more colors, more systems, more incident per inch than the zigzag, the tessellation, the mesh or the waves. It is as if the book, having demonstrated the stripe in its pure forms, ends by spending everything at once, bands, tiles, pinstripes, three colors and black, and daring the combination to fall apart. It does not fall apart, and the reason is hierarchy: the black bands govern, the green tiles occupy, the red and gold lines merely visit, each system keeping to its own frequency like instruments in an ensemble.
That discipline is the Meiji pattern book's deepest lesson, and it came from the loom and the stencil rather than the academy. A design that must be dyed, registered, repeated and worn has no use for decoration that cannot hold its place. The stripe grid holds five places at once, and looks, a hundred and twenty years on, entirely serene about it.
The Stripe, Structural
The Shima Shima books argue, page by page, that stripes are not a minor pattern category but the foundation of all textile design, since every woven cloth is, at bottom, stripes of warp and weft. This design makes the argument at its most elaborate: stripes as beams, stripes as stitching, stripes as the light between tiles. It is the fitting close to the collection, the page where the book's humble subject reveals the whole of its ambition.
As a print, the grid has a quality rare in pattern: repose without dullness. The tiles settle, the bands hold, the pinstripes hum quietly through, and the surface rests, complete from edge to edge, like a wall that has finished being built and is content to be looked at.
