in the studio
After every exhibition I have to learn how to paint again. There has been enough time away from it to make it all new again.
my secret life /
Here comes the last week of my exhibition. What happened.
A year of painting, 26 years of splashing ink, and smearing oil paint before that. I started in New York and now here I am on this little green hill in Yanaka.
How did this happen? How did it happen so fast?
Good times. Bad times.
This exhibition's bad comes from the days I could not be here. In New York you put your paintings on the wall for a month and you are in the gallery for the opening. In Tokyo people expect to see you every day. Some days I teach. I missed some old friends, and some new ones.
It is something to sit and look at a years work on the wall. People say this year fits together more than others. Perhaps its because of the frames, a unity of frames, and of scale. It is not a big place. Smaller work fits.
I used more color. And a much smaller brush. My favorite brush for the paintings in this show was made out of three thin hairs from the whiskers of a Chinese rat. It makes a very fine line.
So many times in life, a very fine line.
It starts /
It starts with and empty space, but this year it started with a title, "My Secret Life". I needed a title for the community art map deadline before I had a concept for my show. So I stole one from a Leonard Cohen song.
What I had was a disordered collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings that I had been working on and a rather disconnected life.
Now it comes together, paintings done andframed, space cleaned and waiting. Titles yet to be come up with. An opening day set at the end of this week.
Come and see how it all worked out. A mystery that is still unfolding.
painting /
these days i do my best work on rocks and tee shirts.
Mt. Aso, a caldera /
I was in Mt. Aso last week and met some very interesting people and learned a new word, "caldera," not to be confused with a volcanic crater. Mt. Aso's caldera measures 25 km. north to south. The whole city is inside it. You look up and see the giant rim everywhere you go. as Wikipedia tells us caldera are know to host rich mineral deposits, and Mt. Aso certainly does. They dig it up with bulldozers, a wonderful yellow ore, a pigment, and a vitamin supplement. It looks like Raw Sienna from Italy, and if you roast it it becomes a strong iron red color. Japanese call the color "bengara." They gave me some to play with, raw and roasted.
There are great hot springs, great water, and remarkably sophisticated food. I have eaten a lot of hot spring hotel food. It always looks great, but does not always taste that way, not always fresh. The meals I had in Mt. Aso were remarkably good.
And a final discovery, on my way out of town I stopped at a little stationary store, wonderful place, bought some ink for my pen. The guy suggested a bamboo pen. I didn't laugh in his face, but come on. I have been whittling bamboo pens before he was born. But then I bought one, 600 yen, what the heck. It is great, ten times better than I have ever made. It was made from the bamboo they used to use for the samurai's arrow shafts. Never doubt a Japanese crafts person.
I received an email: 阿蘇の松谷文華堂でアルカイック工房のBAMBOO PEN をお買い上げくださいましてありがとうございました。
今後ともよろしくお願いします。
it recommends for now buying the pens from Aso, Matsutani, Bunhana-do. It is the fine little shop where found them.
BunHana Do
Chasing the devils /
February 3rd, the point half way between the solstice and the equinox. In America they wait a ground hog to show itself, in Europe it used to be bears. In Japan people throw soy beans at other people wearing devil masks, to chase out the bad luck, pull in the good.
Every year I am left at the last minute with a little thin paper mask, free at the grocery if you buy the beans.This year Iwanted to be ready, start early. This weekend I began working on a mask.I decided to make a really horrible scary devil.I have made masks before.I blew up a balloon head sized and began my paper mâché.I followed my own design, changing as I went along.I had a scary mask inside me.I could certainly make a devil.
Today I started to put on the paint.And it was pretty obvious that I was making a clown rather than a devil.
I went to the Internet, searching, "oni mask". Boy they were good.They scared the bejesus out of me.The best were based on noh masks of a woman scorned.Scary as hell. Probably I should have started with an Internet search, but I wanted to make my own devil. It turns out I am more of a clown.
