Bonsai!

One of my students has been doing bonsai for many years and she invited me to a meeting of the local bonsai club she belongs to. They were having a bonsai master from Puerto Rico do a talk and demonstration. I got my keeper, Janis, and headed off to the meeting. This was to be more interesting than I thought.
   Apparently this man, Pedro Morales, is a world-class bonsai artist. He started off with a powerpoint presentation of  what was going on "out there". He said he thought it was important that the group see what others around the world were doing with the bonsai. There started a discussion of the stylistic differences of traditional bonsai vs the new generation bonsai. Is this starting to sound familiar? I thought so.
  He touched on competition. There are shows that these people bring their trees to and are judged. He spoke of how he familiarized himself with the style of the judges and worked his creations appropriately, to appeal to their particular tastes. This should be familiar to those of you who have competed in tournaments. I used to do the same thing when I was competing. I wrote about it in my books but here's the gist. I'd harden them up for the karate judges and flow them for the kung-fu people (of which there were not many in the 70's in the Midwest).
   Someone asked him why he selected a particular person to go study with. He talked about his teachers and how far he had to travel to work with them. One point he made was about how his teacher told him he needed to do a particular thing and he disagreed, telling him it just wouldn't work, "no way". He decided to comply, even with his misgivings, and was very surprised to find the instructions were correct and it worked beautifully. He was gracious enough to go back and admit he was wrong and passes that information down to others he teaches. How often does this occur in our training; we are told to do something, we have our doubts and after all, it works? Happens all the time.
   The demonstration he gave was interesting. I really had no idea of how they train the trees and the complexity of the art. I'm always fascinated by the genesis of these things. Who thought of this and why? Then they worked out how to make it pass. The difference in style, like in our arts, was apparent. The Japanese traditionalist makes the tree tell a story with a minimum of information to the viewer. Chinese, Southeast Asian and European bonsai have a different look. There are styles within the styles -  cascade, windswept and others. Some get classified as "landscape" instead of bonsai due to small changes. Technicalities you might say. But we do the same in the martial arts. 
   He worked a tree and explained what he was doing and why. He got people to picture where that three would be in a year or two or five. It really was interesting. I found that when they say something is true when it is true everywhere, it's true. People are people and the concepts they used in their art are like ours. People talk about tradition vs innovation, interpretation, vision, stylistic variations, appeal to the eye and more. In this, their art is like our art. I'm glad I had the opportunity to see this and listen in.