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Views of the Hozu River
I was a painter in Boston in the 70’s and 80’s. I worked
from nature, like Corot, but my Fontainebleau Forest was in Revere and
Winthrop, Massachusetts. Later, I worked from iconic images of nineteenth
century Luminist and vernacular painting like the Mississippi River, the
Adirondacks and Niagara Falls, traveling and sketching my own versions
of these landscapes. I developed some of these images in the studio, trying
to find a way to be a contemporary painter. My mentor and teacher, Kaji
Aso, was a contemporary Japanese painter who had absorbed traditional
Japanese culture (he was designated a “living national treasure”
for his calligraphy and sumi painting), but he was also a contemporary
artist, developing his own voice in response to the world he lived in.
I always had a day job restoring antique furniture and making traditional
reproductions. Eventually, inspired by the contemporary craft of the time,
I started to find ways to bring my painting ideas into furniture pieces.
Furniture is slow. It takes a long time to learn how to make furniture
well. Finding an artistic voice using furniture as a medium is even slower.
These pieces represent my attempt to bring my concerns as a painter into
the medium of contemporary furniture. I made two new paintings for this
show and found to my surprise that, after a hiatus of some twenty years,
I not only picked up where I left off, but I had actually developed. In
places where I used to get stuck, somehow I sailed on through. It's always
a struggle, but I discovered a certain clarity and an appreciation for
the simplicity of painting. A few years ago I found a wonderful 18th century
screen painting in the Boston MFA, The Hozu River by Ike Taiga, and I
sketched each of the panels. I continued to think of the Hozu River as
I developed furniture ideas. Although some of these pieces were made earlier,
I realized that they could all be views of the Hozu River and that this
title might help explain what I’ve been up to.
My ideal artist is someone who finds his or her own way to be contemporary
yet who can address human history and nature – nature is very important
- or at least reach back a ways, like Cy Twombly, and photographer Hiroshi
Sugimoto, architects Tadao Ando and Arata Izosaki. I also admire the work
of Robert Irwin, who stripped western art of most of its elements down
to the essential experience of perception, and who has always done it
in the most highly crafted way. And Vija Celmins, who can slow time. That
may be a lot for a furniture maker to claim as influence, but then, as
I said, furniture is slow, and there’s always a lot of time to think.
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