Lonely House Bairei by Pública Rework: Someone Lives Here

Lonely House Bairei by Pública Rework is an art print of a single thatched cottage standing above a stretch of worked fields. The title calls it lonely. The picture quietly disagrees, because nearly everything drawn around the house is evidence that somebody has been looking after it.

Lonely House Bairei by Pública Rework is an art print remastered from the ukiyo-e woodblock illustrations of Bairei Gakan by the Japanese artist Kōno Bairei (1844 to 1895). It uses elements from Cottage, from the original 1913 edition. The print is produced on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g and comes in two sizes, 30x40 cm and 50x70 cm.

Every mark in the picture is somebody's work

The house is the only building in sight, and it is also the most carefully kept thing in the drawing. A flight of stone steps has been cut into the bank and laid straight up to the door. A dry stone wall holds the slope beside them. A fence of close set stakes runs along the boundary on the right. The plank door carries a brace across it, a low porch roof rests on a few thin posts, and the thatch above is capped at the ridge with poles laid crosswise and weighted down.

Below all of it, the ground has been worked. The flat land to the left is drawn as pale bands divided by dark ridge lines, with small upright strokes standing in loose rows across them. That is not wild country. It is ground somebody floods, plants and walks through.

The only thing the picture leaves out is a person. Look for one and you find a bird instead, a single dark fleck in the sky, high and to the left, about the size of a comma. Kōno Bairei is best known for pictures of birds and flowers. Here he draws the one bird small enough to miss, and gives the rest of the sheet to a house.

A picture that outlived the hand that drew it

Kōno Bairei died in 1895, and the edition this plate comes from was printed in 1913, eighteen years later. The drawing was already being carried forward by other hands long before Pública Rework reached it, which makes this print at least the third set of hands on the same image.

Two marks sit on the sheet, and they keep to separate territory. Bairei's red seal stays inside the picture, low and to the right of the roof, printed at the same weight as everything else. The Pública Rework mark, a single open brush circle, sits outside the drawing altogether, down in the corner of the bare paper, with the name Bairei set in small type beneath it. One mark says who made the picture. The other says who brought it back, and points at the first.

If the idea of an old picture carried forward rather than copied appeals to you, Peacock Ohara by Pública Rework works the same method on a different Japanese source, and asks what a rework is allowed to add.

Two sizes, and a print that brings its own margin

The drawing takes up rather less than half the sheet, and the rest is bare paper. That is not a crop decision made in Copenhagen. It is how the plate was composed, with the scene set low and to the right and a wide field of nothing above it and to the left.

The practical effect is that this print arrives with its own margin already inside it. A generous mount, the thing most small drawings need before they can hold a wall, is drawn into the sheet. Frame it close and it still has room to stand.

Two sizes are offered, 30x40 cm and 50x70 cm, and both hold the same composition. The choice is less about how much detail you gain and more about how much quiet you are willing to hang. The print is produced on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g, the heavier art paper NOKUKO uses for illustration prints. Frames in the photographs are shown to illustrate and are not included.

A house in a picture is usually somewhere to arrive. This one is somewhere you have not reached. The path is drawn, the steps are laid, the door is shut, and the distance between you and it is most of the sheet.

Hang it where you pass slowly. It asks nothing of the room and it does not perform. What it offers is the small relief of a place that is plainly cared for and plainly far away.

About Lonely House Bairei

What paper is Lonely House Bairei printed on?
It is printed on Fine Art Freja paper at 265 g, the heavier art paper NOKUKO uses for illustration prints. The source is an ukiyo-e woodblock illustration, and most of the sheet is the pale ground itself, so the weight of the paper is doing visible work. The frame shown in the product images is for illustration and is not included.

What sizes does Lonely House Bairei come in?
Two sizes, 30x40 cm and 50x70 cm. Both hold the same composition, with the cottage set low and to the right and the worked fields running away to the left.

Does Lonely House Bairei come in different colourways or editions?
No. There is one version of this print, offered in the two sizes. The red seal beside the roof is Kōno Bairei's own, printed as part of the picture, and the Pública Rework mark sits below the drawing on every copy.

Is Lonely House Bairei a limited edition, and does it come with a certificate?
No to both. It is not one of NOKUKO's limited editions, which are held in a separate collection, and no certificate of authenticity is issued, because certificates accompany original works rather than prints. It is available from NOKUKO with free worldwide shipping on orders over €120.