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Phone: 905-845-3824 (ext. 5559) Fax: 905-337-5567 e-mail: rjerred@haltonsearch.com W L ! ) \!,S D .\Y NI. \ I I I » 2<*>3 · tV » g e l*4 - AR T S fflE Woodcut artist credits three mentors for impacting her work By Craig MacBride SPECIAL TO THH BEAVER small slice of work from an Oakville-based artist is current ly on display at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. The exhibition. Tree Spirits: the Woodcuts o f Naoko Matsuhara, fills two rooms at the ROM and spans 40 years of her life as an artist. The exhibit runs until June. The show follows the recent release of Matsubara's book of the 177 woodcut prints donated to the ROM in 1988. The book of prints, itself, is only a small slice of the work that she has done through her years, and the exhibition is a slice of that slice. On Friday, she revealed another slice of her life with a lecture at the ROM. The Education o f an Artist: From Kyoto to Toronto, celebrating her mentors and the places that have inspired her woodcuts. In a lecture hall decorated in an Ancient Egyptian theme, with canvases draped on the walls of the theatre, hiero glyphics painted on them, and the deep thundering of the subway passing under ground every 10 minutes or so. Matsubara gave a beautiful talk. In a soft, high-pitched voice, the small woman with a young face and ele gant eyeglasses, with a sheer, black cape hanging from her narrow shoulders, told the audience of nearly 100 about how she got to where she is today. She did this by revealing her three mentors and the impact they have had on her work. `Powerful 'ROM exhibit spans 40 years o f her life A The unique w ork of O akville a rtist Naoko M atsu h ara is currently on display at the Royal O n tario M useum in Toronto. T he exhibition. Tree Spirits: the Woodcuts o f N aoko M atsuhara, fills two room s a t the RO M and spans 40 years of her life as an a rtist. The exhibit ru n s until Ju ne. Right, the m ural she created for the O akville YMCA. Lizzi Rix was the first of these men tors. the earliest guide that Matsubara had into the world of woodcutting. Rix was a professor at Kyoto Academy of Fine Arts when Matsubara was a student there. Rix. a German in Japan, had an inad equate understanding of the Japanese language, and brought her husband to every class that she taught to translate for her. She only gave her students one day of woodcutting instruction, but it was enqugh to plant the seeds for Matsubara's long career. Rix taught the students to feel the wood and then randomly cut at it. focus ing on the strong lines and the grain. As with everything jn Rix's class, the wood cutting project had to be completed by the end of the class. "When you are given very little time," Matsubara said, "you are forced to concentrate furious ly " That spontaneity, she added, leads to a clearer picture than one that you spend a long time polishing. Rix "opened up a vast world of design," and she told Matsubara to go abroad for her master's degree, which she did with enthusiasm. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, she honed her skills and began to receive excited responses to her work. Fritz Eichenberg was the second mentor mentioned in Matsubara's talk. She said that he brought a deeper con science into woodcuts. A Jew bom in Cologne, Germany, he left, his home to escape Nazism after working on under ground pamphlets. His work was large and spoke o f the dignity o f man. Matsubara told the audience. Long after the war and back in Germany, Eichenberg enlisted Matsubara to work on his seminal printmaking book The Art o f Print. Her third mentor, whom she referred to as "her God" on several occasions, was Shiko Munakata. Often thought of as the Picasso of the East, the fame and style of the two artists were quite similar. Matsubara mentioned in her speech that as they grew older, "Picasso went more to the East and Munakata went more to the West," with regards to the style of M OakvHle · 905 844-5501 bookefs@sympattco.ca O H IM N H illtS l A K I N O i l l l I K ' I I O 'N 1. THE POLISHED HOE, by Austin Qarkef.Brunch Event, April 6/03) 2. EXILE. bv Ann IrelandfBnwA Event, Afnil 6/03) 3. THE NAVIGATOR OF NEW YORK, by Wayne Johnston (Autographed) 4. FLINT & FEATHER. by Charlotte Gray (Autographed) 5. THE LOST GARDEN, by Helen Humphreys (Autographed) 6. THE IAST CROSSING, by Guy Vanderhaeghe 7. THE PETTY DETAILS OF SO-AND-SO'S LIFE, by Camilla Gibb 8. CROSSROADS OF TWILIGHT, by Robert Jordan 9. THE ROMANTIC, bv Barbara Gowdy 10. I D O N T KNOW HOW SHE DOES IT, by Allison Pearson 11. THE KING OF TORTS, by John Grisham 12. REVERSIBLE ERRORS, by Scott Turow 13. THE LOVELY BONES, by Alice Sebold 14. QUENTINS, by Maeve Binchv 15. BAUDOIJNO, by Umberto Eco their respective work. atsubara told a story of her first meeting with the great artist. She arrived with a tube full of prints and a letter of introduction. "He was wearing a pair of brown spectacles an inch and a half thick. He leaned over my prints and went from side to side so close it was like he was licking them. And then he looked up and in his gruff voice said. `Very good."' She again sought his opinion of her work after receiving her master's degree from Carnegie. She sent him prints of her woodcuts and then, working furiously as she was at the time, entirely forgot about them until the day she received an aero gram from Tokyo. "He sent the highest encouragement," Matsubara said, recall ing that she started crying when she read his comments for the first time. Not long afterwards, she was includ ed in an American show of three genera tions of Japanese woodcutters. Sharing the show with Munakata and his teacher, she was overwhelmed. She read an excerpt from the speech she gave the night of the opening of that show. Y iiN 4 , S T . I * \ T I K I ( K 'S l» \ Y A M I >1 A I M I I I t l t l A K HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION, bv Thomas Cahill 2. VOICES OF IRELAND, > by Malachv McCourt 3. PILGRIM IN IRELAND, by Frances Greenslade 4. IRELAND, by Lonely Planet 5. UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO WALT DISNEY WORLD, by Frommcrs 6. DISNEY'BOOKS SELECTION, (including Monsters Inc., Ulo & Stitch, Winnie the Pooh, etc.) (Children 3-12) 7. RUSH HOUR TRAFFIC JAM PUZZLE, by Binary Arts (all ages) 8. BRAIN QUEST SERIES, by Chris Welles Feder IKindergarten-Grade 7) 9. INTERNET LINKED BOOK SERIES, (including Sliarks, Trains, Rig Cats, Bugs etc.) by Usborne 10. THE AMBER SPYGLASS, by Philip Pullman (Young Adull) 11. ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, rM NOW THE GIRLFRIEND OF A SEX GOD. by Louise Rennison (Young Adult) 12. HARRY POTTER BOX SET, byJ.K. Rowling (Children 8-12) 13. SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS BOX SET, bv Lemony Snicket (Children 8-12) 14. HOOT, bv Carl Hiaasen (Children 8-12) 15. WEE SING AUDIO CASSETTE SERIES, by Pamela Conn Beall (all ages) 1. `T o follow these giants, I am grate ful," she said, "but I feel that it is too much of a burden being so early in my career." O f Munakata. she said. "He tried to be empty like a Zen master to let a spirit cre ate for him." And that is one of the methods she learned from him. "I don't want to con trol or arrange my work." she said. "If possible. I'd like to go into the realm of the infinite." Later in the night, Klass Ruitenbeek, curator of the Asian arts department at the ROM, gave a guided tour of Matsubara's work. Ruitenbeek said the two-room show was "a very small exhib it, but very powerful." The most powerful of the pieces was Westinghouse. Being a foreign student in America not long after the Second World War. she was taken on tours with other foreign students to see the greatness of the country. Matsubara was amazed by the Westinghouse factory that they visited, and she created a large woodcut based on her visit. From across the room, the piece looks like a cluttered, black and white overhead map. Once close to the piece, though, you can see the figures of people at work with tools, hunched or kneeling within the machinery of the factory, sur rounded by it and caught within it. What is amazing about this show is the time it spans. Westinghouse was cre ated in 1962 and is juxtaposed on the wall with Wind in the Willows, a piece Matsubara created in 2000. The contrast is remarkable. The black-and-white starkness of Westinghouse is replaced, in Wind in the Willows, by a lot of white space, inter rupted by flowing, muted colours, the result of the shapes being printed through a filter of thin mulberry paper. In comparison to the dark and furious piece next to it. Wind in the Willows seems to show an artist resolved and patient. Matsubara's Portrait o f Ravi Shankar is another piece that stands out in the small collection. It's large scale and the intensity of the subject is striking, and a description of the work tells how she came to create the piece. "She was so moved by a concert of the great Indian musician that, the next morning, she directly carved into a large wooden block a composition seeking to capture in black and white the sounds and rhythms of the sitar and tabia." The most colourful pieces in the col lection. described by Ruitenbeek as "an explosion of colour" come from her work about places she has visited. Brilliant reds, greens and golds cover her Tibetan inspired prints, and slightly more subdued blues and greens dominate the work inspired by Nova Scotia and the Arctic. During the question period that fol lowed her lecture. Matsubara seemed to have an affinity for the Arctic. "There's nothing but ice and sky," she said. "(There are) no trees and no noise. The light changes every minute." She also spoke briefly about the mural that she recently created for the new YMCA building in Oakville. For the mural, she painted on carved wood, one of the very few practices that she hadn't fully explored before, and she mentioned that she plans on doing more of that kind of work in the future. She ended her talk by answering a question about what she is trying to achieve through her art. "I want to be very honest to myself." Matsubara said, "and I want to satisfy the criteria for whatever I'm searching." "In every life," she added pensively, "you have to see." ··· If you can't make it down to the ROM, you can catch Naoko Matsubara at a book signing at the Abbozzo Gallery, 179 Lakeshore Rd. E. on Thursday night. The artist will be sign ing copies of her 314 page catalogue from 6^8 p.m. The gallery will also be showing a collection of her woodcuts. * 1 I B e s t B e ts p r o v id e d c o u r te s y o f I I j i i i i i i i i i ---------------------------------------------- i i i N A M E O F YOUR S C H O O L G R O U P O R O R G A N IZA TIO N : | Send or drop off your collected coupons to: THE OAKVILLE BEAVER, 467 SPEERS RD. OAKVILLE ON L6K3S4 B o o k E R S j [ ! No copies or reproductions accepted