I moved

sorry I have not kept up this blog.  I moved my energy to my new web site,  Jimhathawayink.com

Through today I don't seem to have very much energy at all.

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.

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.