exhibition October 2014

JimuSoan 2014 Mandala exhibition

The show is up, and the first week is already finished. Information about the show is on my new web page:

jimhathawayink.com

i also started a new twitter, and have been having fun writing twitter poems every day

@jimhathawayink

Ok it is not Kipling, but give me some time to warm up.

exhibition walls

ichijo walls

Every year for the past 23 I have had an exhibition in October in Yanaka.

Next week my exhibition will open.



Preparing for the exhibition I start with the walls.  If you are going to show paintings you will probably want to hang them on the wall. Galleries always have walls, it is a central part of being a gallery, unless your gallery is inside a Japanese house. For everyone knows that Japanese houses have no walls.

Japanese houses have doors. They have windows, they have sliding paper screens between rooms and paper doors to cover the closet. My little Taisho era tenement row house has no walls at all. Sometimes I lay awake at night wondering how the roof stays up. 


So every year when I make my exhibition I start with the walls.

more information at jimhathawayink.com 

Meaning

I just added a page to my new web site titled, Meaning.  I went against Matisse, and his advice that artists should cut out their tongues.

http://www.jimhathawayink.com

from a letter to an old friend on the other side of the world, 4 am today

Sunday I got thru alone, trying to put life in order, a little cleaning, a preparing of lessons for the coming season, and attempting some product branding that my sister had so strongly suggested. She is a machine, a new and complex creation every few months, a web site, linked with printerest or some such internet thing, there are so many new internet things. She is blogging, tweeting, fade booking, poking her publishers for links and connections.

So I changed my domain name. Instead of brushink.com, the domain name I have used for the past ten years I registered jimhathawayink.com. She lobbied for putting my name out front for purposes of branding, Jim's cola, that sort of thing. So i did.

It is possible to go too far with this. I have also opened a twitter account @jimhathawayink but I can't seem to tweet. It seems too abstract and more like clutter than anything of importance. I did get my first follower, a kind soul I have never met. My sister showed me ways to get more by following other tweeters and hash tagging and other magic. But again, it seems like clutter, and perhaps not reaching people who might enjoy my paintings.

My paintings are silent. Paintings don't move. It is their nature. It defines them. Paintings just sit there and wait, sometimes for hundreds of years to be seen or appreciated. Paintings have time.  More and more it makes painting seem a nostalgic activity. A thing of the past.

Paintings are not Andy Warhol. They aren't pop. They aren't fashion. They aren't hype.

But of course they are. Always have been.

Artists are wiggling, struggling, hungry souls, desperate for recognition, a piece of the pie. A person wouldn't put marks on a wall for others to see if they didn't have a pretty big ego. And we are of our time. Though as you point out, you yourself are also of a different time. Part of your soul reaches back into times past.

You and I were born at the dawn of the computer age, into a time of punch cards and spinning reels of tape attached to a whirring beeping buzzing machine that fills a room, alone in its room, unconnected, before the net, before the web.

Now here we are.

Boy, Can I run on. Who put a nickel in me? Perhaps I ought to tweet after all, or at the very least blog - Put this very missive on line, publish it for the world to see, or not see - our brave new world of disconnected people stumbling down streets, little screens so close to their faces, and in a desperate attempt to seize it, miss the world completely.

Event in Kiryu, Gunma, this weekend

Saturday and Sunday I will be in Kiryu, Gunma, Japan, for a weekend even - dance, music and my paintings, including a very large painting made for the event.  More information on my temporary homepage.

https://googledrive.com/host/0Bx1ajccCOebpSFVJY1VoZHVhN1U

new website

I have just made a new web site.

It is a temporary site while i try and rebuild the old one (brushink.com)  i find my brushink site is so complicated and dense i can not understand it myself.  I built it layer upon layer for i dont know how many years.  it shocks me to see some of the things i find on it. it has become like the bath house in the animation, Sen no Chihro (Spirited Away) - structure built upon shaky structure.  I am shocked it stands at all.

It will take some thinking and some cleaning to get the old site into any sort of order, much like my life at the present time.

so take a look at the new site, still under construction itself of course.

https://079bb6507a3b55ff5595fe62c4ba54fcde3cbeff.googledrive.com/host/0Bx1ajccCOebpSFVJY1VoZHVhN1U/

25 years today

Golden week in Japan!  it is the anniversary of my arrival in Japan, 25 years ago today. 

 Perhaps I should bake me a cake.  

This Golden Week I have 5 Golden Days, and intend to spend them downstairs in my studio painting  for the wall of an old Sake brewery shed deep in the wilds of Gunma, where a dance will take place. The wall is over 13 meters long.  I wonder how it will look?  I will not know until April, as my painting space is only 2 meters and a half long and 2 meters wide.  I will paint it a piece at a time.

I will not dance in April, but I  am painting, a creature for the wall.  And in April I will get to see how it looks all strung up.

it begins

Group show in Yanaka

Come one come all! 

We will have an exhibition of local artists and thinkers.  April 1 - 6

It is in Yanaka in Gallery Kingyo, near (HebiMichiDori, snake turn road) near Nezu or Sendagi stations of the Chiy

raw copper

 

 

A fresh cut copper plate, an engraving before it is inked,  Like a new born child, fresh and new, ripe with possibilities.

I may never ink it at all.

scales

It is early yet, but I've already started practicing my scales.

Yanaka at night

These are they guys that wake up a 5 AM to start the morning chant.   It is part of living in a temple section of  Tokyo..  I wonder how many centuries they have been doing this on the coldest days of January.  They keep it up for more than a week, probably the full cycle of 12 days, but that is just a guess.  I know it runs more than a week

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CUyvUQFDD64

m.youtube.com/watch?v=WNkqpmHtFGo

They cover most to the temple section, stopping at every Nichirin Temple.

Who's Picasso now?

Young children  are impressive.  They are true scientists, doing everything they can to unlock the mysteries that surround them.  They want to discover how everything works.

They also are not shy to express themselves with art.  Picasso said something about being able to paint like an old master at 16 and spending the rest of his life trying to learn to paint like a child.

I had fun at Tokyo Kase University yesterday, at the kids center running a workshop in ink painting.  And I will truly say that these young kids put Piccaso to shame.  Direct attack, use of line and marks and space.

Night ride

Coming home from the public bath, thinking it is hard to go out on a cold night, and the baths keep closing and are further and further away, but what a night. I don't envy anyone stuck in at home with their tv on and a hot bath waiting.  To have missed this night under the stars riding home from the sento would have taken something very important from my life.  I am quite thankful that I don't have a bath.