A New Wall /  by Jim Hathaway

I've got new wall. An interesting sake company in the depths of Chiba has invited me to fill their big old storehouse (Meiji Er Kura) with painting.

The Iinumahonke has been making sake in Shisui for over 300 years. They have a magical complex of buildings.

That Meiji Era store house is in the back. They are re-purposing it for visitors. I didn’t measure, but just from stretching out my arm and counting I guess the side wall is 25 meters long, and the ends a little over 12 meters – lots of room for the dragons of my imagination to play.

Wish me luck putting it together. I have until Golden Week (early May). All, of course, are invited to see how it comes together.

There will be an exhibition, a live demonstration of painting out on the lawn and a workshop for children and parents to explore the world of sumi ink.

new crop of conceptual arists /  by Jim Hathaway

An artist friend of mine spends time on the Internet.  He was telling me about the conceptual artists in London coming along, the girl who steals diamonds from jewelry stores and swallows them and follows their progress thru her guts on YouTube.  And there was a guy that digs up other people's shrubs I think.

Is criticism required?

In a world where people buy guns at Walmarts and shoot children, I fear these new Conceptuals have an up hill battle if they want to shock, or surprise.

Poodle sweat.  Hungry ghosts.

my secret life /  by Jim Hathaway

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 /  by Jim Hathaway

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.