30 Years in Yanaka

Yanaka was a backwater when I found it, a place nobody knew unless they had close relatives in the ground here. Yanaka has cemeteries.

We also have history. We are next door to the first imperial school of music and art, the first imperial library, the first national art museum. The great imperial university was founded on the next hill. Mori Ogai, and Natsume Soseki both lived on DangoZaka. Higuchi Ichiyo walked thru. It was her shortcut home.

The roots of Japanese modern arts are here as well, Okakura Tenshin, Takamura Kotaro, Yokoyama Taikan were here.

But I don’t want to talk about history, at least not history that old.

30 years ago Yanaka had people interested in the arts. People were banding together to preserve old buildings and culture against a bubble trend of development gripping Japan.

People formed a Yanaka Gako, a preservation and cultural society. Some of them formed an art group, Geikoten, local architects, artists and others that put together a wondrously complicated map and a month long neighborhood wide exhibition of art and culture in October.

Within a year another art group formed; was it a rival group? Sometimes it seemed so. That group was called Art Link. They had powerful art backing, the National Art U. museum, Ueno Mori Art Museum, SCAI the bathhouse gallery, and the Tatami people. Their exhibition map was simple, well distributed and didn’t cost a hundred yen. They had corporate sponsors. People in company buses visited on mass in October.

I was in both groups, and liked them very much.

Arts in Yanaka were blossoming. People came from far away to see how we did it, to set up community festivals of their own. I was blossoming too. Sumi ink was new. My family was young. Things were going very well and would only go better.

30 years now since I first waked up Kototoi Dori hill, past the shops selling artist pigments, past the brush maker’s shop. Art Link ended. Geikoten still goes on, but more for new cafes and bookshops, fancy new bakeries, craft beer, and bagel shops. Geikoten is promoting different culture now. I have become a dinosaur. It was not what I had intended.

New Year's Cards

Before 1907 Japanese postal law didn't allow a message on the same side of a post card as the address. People were forced to write on the image.

Here is a New Years card sent in 1905 to an American friend.

People stopped sending battle ships for new years some time ago.

New Year’s cards themselves are now dwindling. Line messages prosper. I still send. Today I will decide 2020’s design. Shall I go with the year of the rat? Or Icarus?

My calendar

I mark my year by my exhibition. It is pulls me thru the year. And now that it is done I know my year is almost over. Gallery walls come down. Sold work will be packed up and delivered.

Time then to clean, to prepare to meet a new year, and to know that I will be being pulled along by the next exhibition.

Painting the exhibition

For the last three days I have been doing a small oil painting before the exhibition opens.

It is rare for me to use oils. Even more rare in a room full of ink paintings.

Below are the painting at the end of each days work. I thought it was finished the first day, by the evening I realized the proportions were wrong. This sort of revision is impossible in ink painting.

What Kind of Art?

After so many years working with ink and washi in Japan Mr. Hathaway finds himself in a situation not unlike Frank Lloyd Wright designing the second Imperial Hotel - Foreigners looking at the hotel said, “So very Japanese.” Japanese said, “So very foreign.”

Mr. Hathaway studied oil painting and worked in the art business in New York before escaping to Japan and taking up the tools and materials of ink painting, using them to create a new world.

His exhibition, Naked Again, will show a dozen new works, ink on Japanese paper, landscapes for the most part.

If you find yourself in Tokyo at the end of October, please stop by!

Open this weekend and the first weekend of November.

the walls

I was about to hang my new exhibition and was struck by the condition of the walls. they have been red for a number of years and were exciting, but have started to look old.

It is time for a change. Above is the before picture.