THF Galleries: Haiga and Photo Haiku of Robert Erlandson

Robert Erlandson

The Haiku Foundation honors the work of contemporary masters of the dual art of haiga: visual image wedded to haiku. This month’s featured artist is Robert Erlandson.

Robert Erlandson is a professor emeritus of Engineering. Alongside his technical writing he maintained a journal of notes and poetry, and painted for over fifty years. Currently, he draws, paints, creates digital art and writes for the joy of expression. His latest book, AWE, a chapbook of images and poetry, is available from Amazon books. His poetry and haiga have appeared in Ribbons, Cattails, Frogpond, The Heron’s Nest, Prune Juice, Bones, and Contemporary Haibun Online. The majority of the haiga in this gallery originally appeared in Haigaonline, with three haiga originally appearing in DailyHaiga.

This collection of haiga addresses what Ernest Boyer describes as core human commonalities; that is, “universal experiences that make us human, experiences shared by all cultures on the planet.” (Boyer, A Quest for Common Learning, 1981) These commonalities are: The Life Cycle, Language (words, symbols, mathematics), The Arts, our place in Time and Space, Groups and Institutions, Work, The Natural World, and a Search for Meaning.

Focusing on how these human commonalities find expression in a complex world motivated the creation of these haiga. The haiga images include photographs and digital collages which include digital sketching/drawings, fractal patterns, and photographs. The short poems include haiku, senryu, and tanka.

Click here to find out more about his work.