Travel Journals

Faded Bough, Robert Castagna, Edition of 15

I would stress the importance of keeping a journal while creating a series of work. Art starts off extremely personal and is really an internal dialogue. This dialogue is the seed of your artistic idea. The journal is a way to express these ideas and work them out. Therefore as I work, I keep a journal and often go back to it to recapture the initial inspiration. Once worked out you share them with others. On my trips in Kyoto I found myself reading and writing haiku. Therefore many of my journal entries are interspersed with haiku. It was not until later that I discovered such writing has a history going back to Basho and is known as haibun: short prose and haiku written as a journal.

One of my Cafe haibun was recently published and can be viewed at Contemporary Haibun Online.