CHILD OF PLENTIFUL RAIN

An American landscape photographer charts his development as an artist and describes how Japanese art greatly influenced him.

LaBella’s maturation into a serious artist didn’t happen overnight, he writes; in fact, it took him about 24 years of labor and study. As a landscape photographer, he increasingly found himself less drawn to depictions of grandly panoramic scenes as he “looked for subtleties and nuances that answered the urgings of some unidentifiable inner voice.” This inclination pulled LaBella first toward the Hudson River School and its insistence that there’s a “universe full of nuance, depth, and mystery evident in the most austere subject matter” and then to Japanese art—specifically Shibui, which is more of a school of interpretation than a “sense of refined understatement in art and aesthetics.” LaBella explains: “In nature, and in handicraft, it is irregularity, imperfection—it exemplifies the seven Japanese artifacts of being: simplicity, normalcy, modesty, silence, naturalness, roughness, and implicitness.” This explication suffers from a certain vagueness, but the art presented by the author provides considerable clarification; indeed, the book is brimming with visually arresting photography. Still, LaBella often attempts to cover far too much ground, as he limns brief histories of landscape art and its relation to the European settlement of the New World, Japanese art, and Western encounters with that art; the result of this attempt at thoroughness is a sprawling messiness. His prose style is similarly ill-disciplined, with long cascading sentences in rambling paragraphs. The brief art histories are instructive and thoughtful, and one can’t help but be impressed by his intellectual circumspection; he recognizes that the best understanding of Japanese culture he can hope for would be “the barest foothold of insight.” Nonetheless, his tendency to meander will challenge many readers’ attention; as such, it’s likely to be best enjoyed by those who know the author well and already have a prior interest in his artistic maturation.

A wending artistic memoir with compelling images.