Today we can appre­ci­ate Japan­ese wood­block prints from siz­able online archives when­ev­er we like, and even down­load them for our­selves. Before the inter­net, how many chances would we have had even to encounter such works of art in the course of life? Very few of us, cer­tain­ly, would ever have beheld a Japan­ese print­mak­er at work, but here in the age of stream­ing video, we all can. In the Smith­son­ian video above, print­mak­er Kei­ji Shi­no­hara demon­strates a suite of tra­di­tion­al tech­niques (and more spe­cial­ized ones in a fol­low-up below) for cre­at­ing ukiyo‑e, the “pic­tures of the float­ing world” whose style orig­i­nal­ly devel­oped to cap­ture Japan­ese life and land­scapes of the 17th, 18th, and 19th cen­turies.

“So uh,” asks one com­menter below this video of Shi­no­hara at work, “any­one else come from unin­ten­tion­al ASMR?” That abbre­vi­a­tion, which stands for “autonomous sen­so­ry merid­i­an response,” labels a genre of Youtube video that explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty in recent years.

Attempts have been made to define the under­ly­ing phe­nom­e­non sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, but suf­fice it to say that ASMR involves a set of dis­tinc­tive­ly plea­sur­able sounds that hap­pens to coin­cide with those made by the tools of print­mak­ers and oth­er high­ly ana­log crafts­men. When ASMR enthu­si­asts dis­cov­ered Youtube art con­ser­va­tor Julian Baum­gart­ner, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, he cre­at­ed spe­cial son­i­cal­ly enhanced ver­sions of his videos just for them.

In the case of Shi­no­hara, the Best Unin­ten­tion­al ASMR chan­nel has done it for him. Its ver­sion of his videos great­ly empha­size the sounds of brush­es rubbed against paper, inks spread onto wood, and droplets of water falling into the rins­ing bowl. Of course, the orig­i­nal king of unin­ten­tion­al ASMR in art is uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged to be Bob Ross, host of The Joy of Paint­ing, whose soft-spo­ken indus­tri­ous­ness seems now to inhab­it the per­son of David Bull, an Eng­lish-Cana­di­an ukiyo‑e print­mak­er liv­ing in Tokyo. In a sense, Bull is the West­ern coun­ter­part to the Osa­ka-born Shi­no­hara, who after a decade’s appren­tice­ship in Kyoto crossed the Pacif­ic Ocean in the oth­er direc­tion to make his home in the Unit­ed States. But how­ev­er tra­di­tion­al their art, they both belong, now to the float­ing world of the inter­net. You can lis­ten to non-ASMR ver­sions of the videos above here and here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

Watch the Mak­ing of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints, from Start to Fin­ish, by a Long­time Tokyo Print­mak­er

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

There’s ahead of its time, then there’s Traité des couleurs ser­vant à la pein­ture à l’eau — or, in its orig­i­nal Dutch title, Klaer Ligh­t­ende Spiegel der Ver­fkon­st, a 900-page book of paint col­ors made before any such things were com­mon tools of the artist’s, scientist’s, and indus­tri­al designer’s trade. Author and artist A. Boogert cre­at­ed one, and only one, copy of his extra­or­di­nary man­u­al on col­or mix­ing in 1692. Appear­ing on the thresh­old of mod­ern col­or the­o­ry, and fea­tur­ing over 700 pages of col­or swatch­es, the book draws on Aristotle’s sys­tem of col­or rather than the new under­stand­ing of the col­or spec­trum, ful­ly elab­o­rat­ed by New­ton in his Opticks over a decade lat­er.

It would be anoth­er hun­dred years before a flood tide of col­or books began to make the the­o­ry more prac­ti­cal: from Goethe’s 1810 The­o­ry of Col­ors and Werner’s 1814 Nomen­cla­ture of Colour to the dream of col­or stan­dard­iza­tion real­ized: the Pan­tone com­pa­ny, launched in 1963.

But if A. Boogert had much influ­ence on the the­o­ry or prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion of col­or in his day, there doesn’t seem to be much evi­dence for it. Of course most of the Dutch mas­ters had died when the book was com­plet­ed, and it seems unlike­ly that those still work­ing in 1692 would have been famil­iar with its sin­gle copy.

Instead, the book was meant to edu­cate water­col­orists, hence its French title, which refers to “water-based paint.” (A lit­er­al trans­la­tion of the Dutch runs some­thing like “clear­ly light­ing mir­ror of the paint­ing art.”) Medieval his­to­ri­an Erik Kwakkel found the book in a French data­base, “and it turns out to be quite spe­cial,” he writes, “because it pro­vides an unusu­al peek into the work­shop of 17th-cen­tu­ry painters and illus­tra­tors.

In over 700 pages of hand­writ­ten Dutch, the author, who iden­ti­fies him­self as A. Boogert, describes how to make water­colour paints. He explains how to mix the colours and how to change their tone by adding ‘one, two or three por­tions of water.’… In the 17th Cen­tu­ry, an age known as the Gold­en Age of Dutch Paint­ing, this man­u­al would have hit the right spot.”

The book is cur­rent­ly housed at Bib­lio­thèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, where you’ll find full-page, zoomable, hi-res­o­lu­tion scans. “Beyond being infor­ma­tion­al, the images from the book are stun­ning and addic­tive flip through,” notes Refinery29. “They resem­ble page after page of Pan­tone col­or chips, except with­out the house­hold name.” One won­ders if “A. Boogert” would have become a house­hold name had his book been print­ed and dis­trib­uted. But his col­or sys­tem was already pass­ing away in the New­ton­ian age of col­or spec­trums and wheels, until paint chips final­ly came back in style. Vis­it the col­or man­u­al online here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Goethe’s Col­or­ful & Abstract Illus­tra­tions for His 1810 Trea­tise, The­o­ry of Col­ors: Scans of the First Edi­tion

Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colour, the 19th-Cen­tu­ry “Col­or Dic­tio­nary” Used by Charles Dar­win (1814)

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness