The Art of Bonsai Project

comeon Chuck,
if that were of importance than you would have to give credit to the folks who are critiquing your tree when you show it on the net. Credit to all the lunatics? It is clearly the person who has made the major impact who gets the credit. Sometimes it may be more than one person. In general it is the person who has physically made that impact. But not always.
There are folks who belive that styling bonsi is all about wiring. So if a tree was wired 100 5 by one person they think this person shold get all the credit. WRONG! Any reasonable craftsman can properly wire a bonsai. Wiring is exchangable. Wiring does NOT make it a good tree. Selecting branches and placing branches does. While the wiring job may take 12 hours the selectng part will take a few minutes. But it is the few minutes which make all the diference. IT DOES NOT MATTER WhO WIRED A BONSAI!
A tree in a workshop or a tree created by an assistant may be a borderline case. Some may know David, my prime assistat. He has taken this spruce of the material shelve (whih I have colleced and potted and cared for so far all myself) and styled it in two days. Pictures will follow later. We have biefly discussed the general direction of the tree and then he worked on it. In betweeen we had a short discusion about cutting of the lowest branch and of possibly taking off another branch( which we did not). It looked quite good when he was finished after two days. After the tree was finished I turned it around and around and tweaked it a litttle here and there. I think it looked slightly better afterwards and David agreed.
So who gets credit for the tree?
It depends: When I want to sell that thing it is a Walter Pall tree, because it really is and it will demand a higher price.
If David wants to show it it is a David tree (owned by Walter Pall) because it really is and he should get credit for it.
If it is just standing in between hundreds of Walter Pall trees here in my garden it is a Walter Pall tree.
I will never exhibit this one, but if I did, I would give David credit.
After a couple of years I will pesonally have touched this tree several times and slowly have made it one of mine. If it is still around in a few years. then it truly will become a Walter Pall tree.
Such is life if one has helpers.
Well, all this while David has done 99 % of all the work and certainly 100 % of the wiring. Unfair? Well, if David felt that this was unfair then he should give up being an assistant and work in his own garden all by himself.

1) Walter Pall spruce before
2) Walter Pall/David spruce after

The temporal nature of bonsai art implies the artist's touch fades with time. Can anyone name a bonsai artist from 4 centuries ago? Can anyone identify that artist's style? In time the hand of all bonsai artists fade from their trees and only the tree endures - in fact the hand of all artists eventually fades from all art forms. In some arts this happens very quickly - peformance art such as dance where the art is gone immediately after the performance and only the memory lingers. In others it takes millenia - sculptures oxidize slowly over the years. Bonsai lies somewhere in between.
Maintaining the provenance of a bonsai has importance for cultural and marketing reasons. However, in time it all will fade to the persent and near past. It's a fact of life. (Engineers have quantified it via the second and third laws of thermodynamics.)

Great finally Walter!
I am sure that the thought has never entered David's mind, as I am sure he basks in the priveledge of learning and assisting a person such as yourself. To sum it up, the cost of tuition, which in some cases is priceless.

Forgive me if someone else has already stated this:
If as you say this is about the artist Please explain why you are taking pictures of the trees?
Why not just a picture of the Artist/Creator?
Bonsai is about the trees not the persons, not the pots, not the stand, not the scroll, not the rock, etc. etc.
Irene

If you owned one of Kimura's master pieces would you try to foist it off as your own work, or would you make sure everyone knew it was a Kimura master piece? This entier discussion would mean nothing if it was totally about the tree, but it's not.

Irene, this is about the trees.
This is also about who created the trees.
Di Vinci's last Supper
Monet's Water Lillies
Walter Pall's Japanese Maple
Why should there be a difference?
When I looked at The Mona Lisa in person for the first time, my first thought was how small it was in real life, I expected it to be bigger. I studied the picture for some time, not once did I think of the artist, I enjoyed the art, it was all about the painting.
In the end though, Di Vinci still gets the credit. And that is all this is about, giving proper credit to the actual artist, what is wrong with that?

Will

Of course there is always Warhol's "Campbell Soup Can".Who gets the credit for that?
andy

Warhol, without him it is just a soup can, like thousands before it and thousands after it. So it is with a master piece tree. With Warhol it was a work of art, with anyone else it might be a copy right infringement.

So Vance....I take it that the creator of the tree or image is not that important at all.It is the name that promotes the work and makes it famous.......the person who displays it?The "name".It's really not so simple at all......damnit!
andy

Geez guys, sometimes I wonder if we aren't worrying too much about the cart, and not enough about the horse.
Mike

You can eat the horse but have great difficulty eating the cart---and I have no idea what I am talking about but it sounds zenish.

Haiku for Vance
AFTER EATING HORSE
YOU DRAG CART UP THE MOUNTAIN
DIE FROM EXHAUSTION

Irene,
I believe in order to grasp the full concept of this discussion you need to read the entire thread from the beginning. Should this have been done, I believe you have missed the point somewhere in the discussion.
Although opinions will vary, it is about giving credit where credit is due.