The August meeting saw the welcome return of Mark and Ritta Cooper as guest speakers, last year they gave a talk on accent plants and their use in Bonsai displays.
We also had a practical session under their guidance on both making a moss ball display and planting a pot with a suitable accent plant.
This year their talk was centered on displaying Shohin size bonsai but also picking up on displays in general and how we differ from the Japanese in some aspects of showing our trees.
For instance the Japanese display deciduous trees in the winter to show as they appreciate ramification more whilst we display here mainly in the summer with full foliage on the trees who,s to say this is wrong just different.
Mark started with the basics for composing a display.
This started off some interesting debates even down to such fine details such as the required height of the accent plant and if you use a scroll making sure that the design on the scroll is actually facing in the correct direction to complement the flow of the display.
This picture outlines the principles of the trees direction to the right balanced by the accent ( or compliment ) plant flow back to the left and keeping the eye within the display.
This one shows a display with five items and the relevant flow through out.
We were able to see this put into practice when we visited the Bristol Bonsai club display in Failand Village hall where Mark and Ritta had brought along some Shohin to display.
A close up of the Juniper and accent plant.
In Japan it seems acceptable with Shohin size trees to use more extrovert pots than we would use for larger trees hence the yellow pot used here.
Mark finished off the talk with slides from the various shows they have visited in Japan, what stood out for most of us was just the shear number of dealers selling at these shows,there where rows of them and the material for sale was staggering both in quantity and quality, sorry I didnt take any pics too busy looking at the trees on the dealers stands.
Many thanks to Mark and Ritta for another excellent and interesting talk..
Septembers meeting will be with Simon Temblett who will be giving a talk/practical demonstration on his method of preserving jins and sharis, he will also give any advice and or design views on any of your trees brought in ( native trees preferred), so please bring your trees in.
Meeting will start 19.45 sharp!
