Transformational

In late 1981 I visited The Great Japan Exhibition: Art of the Edo Period 1600 - 1868, at the Royal Academy, having been invited to tag along with the Art Department at Rawmarsh Comprehensive who took a group of interested students along. It was an extraordinary experience for me and I've wondered if the same might have been true for some of the students who were there on that weekend.

I had no idea of the scale of the exhibition, for one thing. The Royal Academy is a big place and the multifarious works on display - not just painting but calligraphy, woodblocks, ceramics, textiles, weaponry, lacquer work, armour, sculpture - went on gloriously for ever. And the information provided was rich in its detail. I was keen to buy a copy of the official catalogue, a handsomely chunky volume in itself, but it was way too expensive for me. (Oddly enough, I came across a second hand copy of a misprinted version a few years later, which now resides on my bookshelf.)

But the main thing about the experience was something I didn't expect at all. I assumed I would find the art involved in some sense exotic, but this wasn't the case. I remember realising in the first room I went into that I felt more at home in the exhibition than I'd ever felt in any art gallery before. In the simplest of terms, I knew right away exactly why what I was looking at was beautiful, even if it manifested other qualities - of humour, of the grotesque, of the spiritual, of the homely.

In some way that unexpected sense of familiarity changed me and the way I looked at the world. I suppose I've been happily working through that transformation ever since.