Esty

100 years ago people who wanted to be artists found a way to get to Paris.  50 years ago the center was New York.  I ask my students at the Art U in Tokyo, "Where is the center of the art world now?"

A lot of my students say that the center in now on line.

I opened a virtual shop on Esty.  What will happen?  Who can say?

https://www.etsy.com/listing/172215775/dragon-mandala-etchingengraving-hand?ref=sr_gallery_1&ga_search_query=hathaway+dragon+etching&ga_view_type=gallery&ga_ship_to=JP&ga_ref=auto3&ga_search_type=all&ga_facet=hathaway+dragon+etching

Dear Mr Richie,

I have to write you even though you are dead.  I was walking up towards your place, your old place, before you moved to Ueno.  I was on the way to my studio from a night down the hill in my pub.  I stopped at Akafudado to get a little more beer and some senbai or something to eat with it when I ran into Doritos.  Can you believe it, Doritos.  when I first came here they didn't even have cheese.  How was it when you arrived?  I guess they didn't even have a store back then, the streets were rubble and you must have lived on the American plan for a while till the locals got back on their feet.

Well now they have everything, all kinds of imported wine, "Hey Mr,  Give me chocolate,"  did you actually ever hear that when you first arrived?   Well now they would not even dane to bite a bar of Hersey's, too rough.  Got to have a Pokey, a Kit Kat is fine, good marketing here you know.

I was just walking by your old house, where you first lived when I first met you, and wanted to say hello.  I remembering you crossing in the middle of the street where I was walking and saying that you were a bad gaijin.  Decorated by the Emperor though, so I guess you weren't so verry bad.

You came to my first exhibition in Japan, because you were a neighbor, and because Mrs. Seki passed the invitation to you.  you used to copy your manuscripts there before you sent them off to the publisher.  I remember meeting you on the street and you announced that you had just posted, "Honorable Guests," about famous visitors to Japan.  You looked so happy that day.  It is a happy thing to get a new book in the mail, out of your hands and have it someone else's responsibility.  good book too.  I enjoyed reading every bit of it.

You were an old guy when I met you, still lots of vigor, but white haired and wearing some kind of baby blue polyester leisure suit that was too far out.  You were old.  I wonder, am I now the same age you were then? 

Winter time now, about the time we lost you.  Might be your anniversary, your first.  Soon anyway around Pearl Harbor Day. Take care.  I miss you.

selling on line

My sister heard a podcast from the public radio, some ex rapper selling his Sharpie drawings on the Internet to former rap fans.  "Its a good idea, JIm,  you should do this too!"

I get requests to buy things on line sometimes, but usually say no.  It doesn't seem right with something as personal as a painting to sell it to someone who has only seen a photo. 

Mostly I am an ink painter.  I use ink because it suits my hand and because it is the most sensitive, evolved materials humans have designed with for expressing a feeling, a line, directly from heart to hand to paper.  It moves fast.  It moves slowly.  Every twitch, every twist, every hesitation, is recorded directly on the paper.  It is honest, no tricks, lies.

But ink painting is not all I do.  Sometimes I etch. 

Etching is a different world altogether, indirect as can be, scratching lines on a piece of metal, covering it with a ground, scratching thru, letting it be bitten by acid, then scratched again and scraped and polished.  I found good results last year when I put it on my anvil and hit it with a hammer.  And when the copper plate is scratched, engraved, hammered and bitten it is smeared with ink then gently cleaned, rubbed and polished untill only what in the artists desires is left to be printed.  Then the plate is put on a press and squeezed tight between steel rollers to a moistened piece of paper, what comes out of the press is the result.

It is the art of Rembrandt, and the art of Blake.

Perhaps etchings are more appropriate to be sold on line.  Perhaps I will try.  And if i do, this will be my first.

Dragons in a Christmas Mandala

 

 

I found it last week in a book.  I had forgotten how much fun it was.  Prices, a better photo, and more information to follow if i decide to go thru with this.

Winter Lotus

I go to the pond when I am free these days.
Every day the lotus change.  They wither and dry.  Like soldiers on a field,  Some still, many fallen down, getting smaller, fading away.

 

  I come home and paint.

 But not only decay, there is the promise of life. 
I picked up a pod that floated on the water.  Out came seeds.

 

The measure of a man

The measure of a man, the measure of a life, How do you measure your life?  I measure my life not from birthday to birthday nor from January firsts.  I measure my life from show to show.  For over 20 years I have had exhibitions in October.  I have other chances to exhibit thru the years, but I measure my life from October to October exhibitions.

And now my years has done.  I am always in a turmoil as to what the next year will be. 

I am forced to take a break from paintingfrom the middle of the summer, to make scrolls and frames, to hang them on the wall, to greet visitors and friends.  Now it is done.  I have been away from painting for 2 1/2 months.  I have forgotten how to paint.  I have forgotten who I am.  November is a chance to start again and to find out who or what I have become.

Last Sunday I didn't do the things I was supposed to do.  Instead I hid in my studio and worked on this dragon.

 

 

thanks to all!

 

Thanks to all who made this years exhibition a success.  Ichiyo's shortcut through Yanaka.  It was a lot of fun to put it together and great to be able to share it with everyone who visited.  Now I go back to my studio and breath a quiet breath, sit in a clean room and wonder what will happen next.

Ichiyo Show Final Days

Today begins the third and last weekend. 

We have had 2 typhoons and a couple hundred visitors, good visitors, good friends.  Yesterday the director from the Higuchi Ichio Memorial Museum visited.  I wonder what she thought.  Whatever it was, she did not say.

 

It was a lot of fun to put it all together, to explore Ichiyo's life through her diaries, and then with my paint.

 

 

I wonder who will visit today on this chilly last Saturday day of the show, or tomorrow on the last  Sunday in the rain.  It is supposed to rain tomorrow;  perhaps it will be a heavy Kurosawa rain, and the exhibition will end like the Seven Samurai - swordplay, and rolling in the mud; Great heroes fall, evil is vanquished, a few survive, and the hard working, but cheerful farmers inherit the earth. One can only hope.

Exhibition underway, watch out for the stairs.

 

My studio was built in the Taisho Era. Some of the younger visitors have not used these sort of stairs.  Narrow, no hand rail, and slippery as hell, fine wood polished by a thousand feet. 

          I only had one visitor come sliding down, bumping his butt each step and screaming each bump.  Made a wonderful noise in my little studio.  He got every head in the place to turn in horror.  Then, boom, he hit the wall at the bottom and like it was a cartoon or something, the painting above him fell off the wall and he caught it in his lap as he sprawled on the floor.  A dozen people all shouted in Japanese, "Are You All Right!"  as they will.

             He jumped up, holding the painting in one hand and his butt with the other saying, "I'm OK! I'm OK!"  Handed me the painting and ran out the door.  In America I guess he would be running to get his lawyer.  Lucky this is Japan.

 

Today begins the long weekend, middle of the exhibition.  Yanaka should be jumping.  nice weather and some kind of local festival, "Yanaka Matsuri!"  Lots of visitors.  Wonder if  any of them will come sliding down my stairs.

the first week, Ichiyo's shortcut through Yanaka, exhibition begins

The exhibition started last week, lots of visitors, young and old. 

Nice to get a variety of folks stopping by.

a clean room

Like a miracle, got it clean.  Today in the typhoon I will hang the show.  Over a year of ink and ideas on the wall for the first time.  It is exciting.

October exhibition to start?

I have got about a week to change this mess into an exhibition.  Oh No! Wish me luck

 

 

 

Ichiyo’s shortcut through Yanaka

New Paintings

2013 October 5 - 20

JImusoan, Yanaka, Tokyo

　12:00～18:00 closed Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday

 http://brushink.com/

Urushi - Japanese Lacquer

Japanese urushi is 4 times the price of Chinese urushi, and Chinese urushi is not cheep.   30 dollars  for the Chinese... 120 dollars for the Japanese lacquer.  I'll take the 30.

That is what I usually say, but I started thinking. Japanese tea, good. Chinese tea, good, but really not the same.

Today I bought the Japanese urushi. I will use it on my new Ichio boxes for my October exhibition. I am interested to see how it works.

Last Live painting at Nakanosawa Museum

Two weeks ago I did a live painting.  The live painting accompanied an oude performance by Mr. Tokomi.  It was the Sunday program to close my exhibition.  It was my first time to hear an oude.  He learned in Tunisia, and plays it fine.

 

I had been thinking what to paint.  It seemed that dragons were the sub theme of the exhibition, so I decided to paint some on this mountain overlooking Maibashi.  To point of view of the Lantern was a mountain view of Gunma.  It was inspired by a visit to the museum last January.  The big city of Maibashi looked so small and far away from up in the mountain on that showy eve.

 

 

I started high up in the mountains.   A dragon far away.

then some swirls.  And all the time Mr. Tokomi was playing along on his oude.

soon we had another dragon and another.

And then it was done. 

 

 Thanks to all.  It was a lot of fun having an exhibition and get to do a live painting up in the mountains of Gunma.  Nice space, nice people.  A lot of fun.

Newspapers

I got some good news from the newspapers about the Nakanosawa Museum show.

Live painting at the Nakanosawa Museum

Last week I was in Gunma, at the Nakanosawa Museum for a talk about my exhibition and a live painting demonstration.  Some old friends and some new.  It was fun to dip the brooms and the brushes into the ink and try a live painting.  It is always a question as to what I should paint and a problem of how long to talk.  People come, some come a long way.  I want to try and share something.  But I don't want to run on so long as to make people bored.  I hoped to speak and paint for 15 or 20 minutes, but it seems I rambled on for 45.  These things happen.  I hope it was OK.  it is a little hard to know from the inside.  But nobody punched me and no one fell asleep, so OK. 

 

I will do one more live painting at the Museum on the last day, a much smaller painting.  It will be in connection with a closing day concert at the museum, Sunday June 30th.

 

 

I painted on 2 sheets of fine cotton cloth, using good sumi ink, a fine Japanese brush from Kumano, Hiroshima, and a small broom from the 100 yen store.

 

Nakanosawa Museum slideshow

  My sister taught me how to put up a slideshow to share photos of my dragon paintings -

http://www.slideshare.net/jimhathaway/nakanosawa-museum

Nakanosawa Museum, Gunma, Japan

I was setting up my exhibition last weekend in Gunma.  It was a contrast to my Japanese nagaya studio.

To supplement the Yamanote paintings I have been working on some larger dragon paintings, but my studio is a Japanese rokujo - 6 mat room.  And the longest I could stretch out my work for paintings was about 2 meters. 



But the longer dragons were 11 meters x 2.2 meters, so it was quite a struggle to keep them in proportion, and I was not able to see the full paintings until they were on the wall in the museum.  I had measured the museum by walking, 26 steps, and measured the height by my own 182 cm. standing by the wall.  I was in a bit of a panic when the dragons went on the wall, wondering if they would fit.

 

There were some tense moments. But in the end they fit.

 

I got to do some ladder work too, setting up a Gunma andon.

Yanaka group show

A Yanaka art group I admire has invited me to join thier group exhibition this year.  It is in a Yanaka tradition I think.  People form an art group not because of similar art but from geographic location.  "All neighbors in Yanaka, so lets show."

At Kingyo Gallery, Sendagi, Tokyo

April 2-7
http://www.gallerykingyo.com/

A request, as it is the 10th anniversary, every artist should bring 2 stones this show.  In addition I have painted a new Yanaka Mandala.

Dragons and Japanese TV

 

My last dragons for the Gunma museum are colored. 
My daughter complained -  "No more Dragons Poppy! People were looking over the fence from the community center!!!"

It is the Japanese in her, wanting to hide.

I was on TV here Tuesday, but they cut out my best words. They asked me what I liked about Yanaka. I said, "Yanaka is full of spies and liars."

 

I meant it in the best possible way.

The same as Oneonta, my hometown, , my grandfather used to say, "Nobody buys the paper to get the news. Everybody knows the news, they buy the paper to see who got caught."

Tokyo winds

Nice cold day in Tokyo today.

I was working on one of the dragons outside and the wind kicked up.  I may have a chance to exhibit this guy at Koya-san holy mountain before it goes to the museum in Gunma.

It will be a busy dragon this spring, if it ever gets done.

new gold

Long dragons for the April exhibition at the Nakanosawa Museum are nearly done.  Yesterday I began working on smaller things, putting gold and silver on some of my roasted mud.

New Year

The New Year break has gone by in the blink of an eye.

again.

Japanese used to have a way to celebrate the new year.  It was the most important time of the year. And the most important thing a person could do was... nothing.  Sit quietly, eat a little food that was already made so that no one would have to be working in the kitchen.  Maybe later, put on your new kimono, visit a friend, or the local shrine.  It was a supremely quiet time.  No one driving.  No one hurrying around.  No stores open, of course.

New Year was that "ma," that quiet time in the Japanese, type A, frenetic year.  A pause. A space.

I have been here.  I have watched Japan loose its quiet space, watched it disappear from the paintings, from the music, from the films, and from the New Year.

It's  like a punchline in a new haiku - "Where did nothing go?"