Bird on a Persimmon Branch

This mynah bird, like all of the birds in Araki’s paintings, are drawn from Bada Shanren’s handscroll, Birds in a Lotus Pond, which was once owned by Araki’s mentor, Zhang Daqian. Here, Araki placed the mynah in an old persimmon tree, its knobby branches bald but for a handful of rust-colored leaves, rendered by layering wet ink and a diluted form of the reddish-orange pigment used elsewhere in this painting. At far left is a bright orange persimmon, a likely self-referential motif found frequently in the paintings of Araki, whose given name Minol means “fruit” in Chinese.