Tokyo/Upsurge/Nightlife

graphite, conte, pastel, photograph, tinted, transparent Plexiglas box, enamelled hardware, each h 58" x w 36"

Exhibition Statement: “The Traveling Artist”, Summer, 2007

“Tokyo/Upsurge” integrates graphite and conte drawing, camera images, and metallic found objects in wall hung structures contrived to recreate the charged quality of Tokyo life as I found it during a year spent in Japan in the mid-1980's. The year fell in a boomperiod in Japanese economic and cultural life, and was an expansive one for me as well.  For a Westerner, even an urbanite like myself, Tokyo is initially overwhelming. The density of pedestrian traffic, the pervasiveness of colorful advertising, the sheer overload of visual information, can be mentally exhausting, but also inexhaustibly thrilling. As a result, I realized early in my stay that documenting what I saw day to day in Tokyo with my Olympus I would become a primary process in the making of my work, and that the photographs would stand as significant elements in the completed pieces, rather than serving merely as guideposts for drawing, as they had in the past.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that these tower-like pieces emerged strictly in response to an alien cultural context. In fact, because I hadfor so long felt sympathy with all aspects of Japanese art and design, I felt aesthetically at home in Tokyo.  Reacting to the influence of calligraphy and sumi-e (ink) painting shows I visited in Tokyo, I loosened my habitual illusionistic rendering, using a technique for pouring powdered graphite through a solvent I’d learned years ago. Indeed, constant exposure to Japanese painting on paper unlocked the psychic door to that creative.breakthrough, producing a harmonic mix of linear control and textural fluidity. In terms of content, however, an ongoing motif in my oeuvre, traceable to the 1970's, remains central to the Tokyo-centered pieces: the heavy machinery involved in the construction of the built environment. In my mind, it makes perfect sense to allow those machines to represent the surge of reconstruction of Tokyo in the post-World War II period.

Some may wonder at the delay in generating mixed media pieces designed to express a 20-year-old experience. Storage wasn’t hard: The wealth of photographs noted above, organized in old-fashioned scrapbooks, acted, and continue to act as triggers to memory.  Moreover, we accept that fiction writers spend years, even decades mulling over events in their past lives, so as to eventually orchestrate those events into moving narratives. In like manner, then, for this artist, the long-term mental processing was crucial to the fabrication of a body of work that bespeaks that singular year in Japan.