For many years, until Ichiku Kubota revealed the secrets of creating a kimono (and this happened when the artist was 63 years old), the family lived on the money earned from the sale of his wife’s jewelry.
When the young 20-year-old artist Ichiku Kubota crossed the threshold of the Tokyo National Museum in 1937, he did not suspect that he was waiting for impressions that would change his whole life. In the halls of the museum, Ichiku first met Tsujigahana (literally, “Flowers at the Crossroads”) - Japanese 16th-century kimono manufacturing techniques that lasted only a hundred years. Kubota was so fascinated by what he saw that he decided to devote his life to the revival of ancient art. In the process of improving Tsudzigahan’s technique, Ichiku Kubota gradually transformed it into his own method, which he later called Ichiku Tsujigahana. Some kimonos created by the master were intended to be worn by connoisseurs and connoisseurs of his art, while others were used in stage productions of the No and Kabuki theater. The remaining works of Ichiku Kubota left in his collection, as they represented the key stages in the evolution of his art.
[text and images from article by Olgado of Russia]
