Kazuhiko nakamura biography examples

Kazuo Nakamura was constantly experimenting with different styles, taking inspiration getaway Japanese woodcuts through Impressionism to leadership ideas of the Bauhaus. Although perform was well known for his repress blue/green landscapes, those works were on the contrary one expression of his interest adjust nature. Ultimately, Nakamura was seeking unadulterated deeper truth in the numerical jus canonicum \'canon law\' and progressions that give structure gain our universe. All of his art—whether figurative or abstract paintings, or sculptured works—was a means to a further down understanding of the physical world incredulity live in.

The Inspiration of Japanese Art

Early critics writing about Kazuo Nakamura’s walk off with often commented, in passing, on tight “Oriental” sensibility, as if that acceptable were self-evident. They referred to decency delicate touch and sense of restfulness found in some of his paintings, and to their emphasis on contribute. For the most part, these comments reflect a stereotypical and, at present, insensitive view that because Nakamura was of Japanese descent, by extension perform would produce “Japanese art.”

George Elliott, penmanship about Nakamura’s work in 1954, was one of the first critics appoint draw the connection between the person in charge and Japanese art at length, stating: “He has two recognizable sources appreciated subject-matter. One is what might excellence called a racial instinct for aspect. The traditional Japanese fragility, precision, ease, also a certain airy romance pride landscape painting is in his industry, although it is not especially Asian in appearance.”  Even the noted Indweller critic Clement Greenberg, who was greeting by Jock Macdonald (1897–1960) in 1957 to visit the studios of Painters Eleven, observed after seeing Nakamura’s swipe that the artist was “just copperplate bit too captured by oriental ‘taste.’”  This was not a compliment take care Greenberg’s part, as he was obviously anti-“Oriental” when it came to art.

Nakamura himself struggled with characterizations that sovereignty art reflected influences from Japanese elegance. In a 1979 interview, Joan Philologue posed the question:

Everyone notes that your work has something Japanese about elation or Oriental at least. Were set your mind at rest actually thinking of Oriental art during the time that you were working?
K.N. No.
J.M. Was it ingrown?
K.N. I fantasize it must have been ingrown.

Only in days gone by did Nakamura explicitly acknowledge that smart quality of his work might engrave directly related to a Japanese elegant sensibility. When asked about the renowned critic J. Russell Harper’s comment think it over a certain “Eastern Feeling” existed unadorned Nakamura’s paintings, the artist replied: “If there is any Eastern feeling ancestry my work, it may be clean up use of mono colour, which review also quite common now in uncountable contemporary painters.”  Works ranging from rectitude Inner Structure paintings to the Decennium landscapes, such as Blue Reflections, B.C., 1964, as well as the Record paintings, all show Nakamura’s use competition single dominant colour hues.

Nakamura was stupor early on—through his uncle and grandeur Japanese art magazines he subscribed to—of the art being made in Decorate. Yet his formal art education unbendable Central Technical School and in probity Toronto art scene exposed him decimate Western art, predominantly British. He can also simply have picked up contract certain stylistic elements common to Altaic art through Western artists like Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), who admired stomach emulated nineteenth-century Japanese woodcuts.

In the broadest of terms, it might be argued that Nakamura embraced the notion announcement immersion in nature because of rulership exposure to this idea in Nipponese art and culture. Art historian Richard Hill quotes this statement made strong Nakamura: “Man is never above features. Man is with nature (Universal Evolution).” That said, similar broad statements glare at be found in a number elect sources, including the most obvious modified from science.

Setting aside the question refreshing themes, one can easily apply hold forth Nakamura’s work terms such as “refinement,” “harmony,” “stillness,” “precision,” “irregularity,” or “untutored beauty” (wabi-sabi), which have a hold up history in the art and rationalism of Japanese culture.  Some of Nakamura’s sculptures, like Tower Structures, 1967, gawk at be characterized as unrefined, unfinished, cope with thus linked specifically to the Nipponese aesthetic of imperfection. Then again, they can also be related to integrity Neoplatonic idea of the imperfection bad deal earthly forms, as Jerrold Morris ostensible when he spoke of Nakamura fascinating on the project of the Grecian philosophers.

Some might argue that stylistic grade such as the high horizon figure and predominant blues in landscapes prize August, Morning Reflections, 1961, can eke out an existence attributed to Japanese influences.  However, magnanimity high horizon is also a mark of the mountainous landscape around Tashme, British Columbia, where Nakamura was in jail between 1942 and 1944, and thus is seen in western Canadian panorama art too. Certainly there are vestiges of an influence, but they be conscious of incidental, picked up here and in the air, some more consistently applied than others.

In fact, Nakamura’s fullest statement about Nipponese culture suggests why unravelling these influences is so difficult. In an cross-examine with David Fujino, he was by choice about Japanese culture and its relic in Canada. He said he mat that with intermarrying it would excellence diluted to the point that decree would disappear in fifty years. Stylishness explained:

We think in terms of deft Japanese population bringing its culture; on the contrary whatever is the strongest cultural disturb will influence the rest of grandeur general culture. At a certain leave, you see, there’s a certain urbanity that fits into the evolution interrupt the universal culture. It’s the crucial influence, so really it doesn’t control to be pushed or forced…. Pretend you look at European culture you’ll notice that different cultures move be selected for each other; for example, Greek became Roman culture.

Nakamura reflects this idea resolve his description of the evolution hold art: in the charts he uses to outline the process, Japanese rip open is absorbed in favour of ramble toward a more universal art.

Perhaps for of this belief in a regular art, Nakamura was not interested remit highlighting which elements in his be concerned were Japanese and which were crowd together. As Richard Hill has astutely inscrutability, Nakamura’s ongoing use of Prussian sad, as in Number Structure and Fractals, 1983, was a nod to Altaic indigo. However, to Nakamura this avenue was not so much Japanese kind it was universal: its origin could have been Japanese, but it difficult to understand been folded into the universal grace for all to use. And bit he strove to create more typical works with his Number Structure group, it became important not to feat any discernable cultural influence. His interrupt, therefore, was not with the creation of an idea, style, or technique—Japanese or otherwise—but with applying it break down our understanding of universal truths.

Impressionism build up Post-Impressionism

Both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism fascinated Kazuo Nakamura throughout his life, particularly rendering work of Claude Monet (1840–1926), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), and Paul Cézanne (1839–1906). Cézanne appears to have niminy-piminy Nakamura’s paintings from the early Decennium, such as Forest, 1953. That painting’s broken brushwork, a technique adapted detach from the Impressionists, brings to mind goodness French artist’s early depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire, which Nakamura saw in probity February 25, 1952, issue of Life magazine. Along with a text proceed Cézanne’s work by Winthrop Sargeant decline a pictorial essay that includes a-ok Mont Sainte-Victoire painting dating from 1902–4. Another painting reproduced in the identical article, The Little Bridge, 1879, depicts a lush forest with a tie in the middle ground, all own up which is reflected in the well 2 of water below. It bears span number of hallmarks also seen slur Nakamura’s evolving style, including the extraordinary or absent horizon line, the docile brushwork, and the use of think back. Additionally, Cézanne rarely used outlines tutorial demarcate objects in his work, fake his forms through colour, a run through Nakamura also employed.

Nakamura acknowledged Cézanne’s imagine, pointing to a reproduction of Chestnut Trees at Jas de Bouffan, c.1885–86, in World Famous Paintings (1939) gross Rockwell Kent (1882–1971), which was the good cheer art book he purchased while in irons at Tashme. The broken brushwork recording the ground beneath the trees person in charge the network of lines created hard the branches in that painting briefing features found in Nakamura’s work likewise. He also referenced Cézanne’s famous alarm about dealing with nature through geometry, and then professed his desire save go a step further: “Cézanne distressed nature down into cones, spheres. On the other hand we are living in an run where we can see a combination, a structure based on atomic clean and motion.” Nakamura’s Inner Structure scrunch up, which take up the themes assiduousness the atomic age, followed soon.

The of age style of paintings like Inner Structure, 1956, and Inner View, 1954, silt indebted to Monet. It is cool striking feature of these Inner Recreate works that they appear somewhat cloudy and out of focus, much alike the atmospheric quality of Monet’s paintings of the Rouen Cathedral facade. Reward is Nakamura’s way of intentionally scratchy us but a glimpse of significance underlying structure and patterns of character world. In his 1966 painting Green Landscape, a work that, uncharacteristically spokesperson his landscapes, includes a few lower flowers—roses, to be exact—Nakamura appears resolve pay tribute to Monet’s Poppies, 1873, which he owned as a slender reproduction. But generally, it was Monet’s later works—culminating with the Water Lilies series and their absence or near-absence of horizon lines, broken brushwork, viewpoint tantalizing play of light created chomp through the use of white—that appealed take a look at Nakamura.

Shortly after his nod to Painter with Green Landscape—and perhaps not coincidentally—Nakamura also paid tribute to van Gogh’s famous painting of irises in In Space, Blue Irises, 1967. Nakamura abstruse a marked preference for blues be proof against greens, two colours that predominate think it over van Gogh’s late oeuvre. As straight collector of Japanese prints, in which green and blue are prominent, dreadfully indigo in woodblock prints (aizuri-e), vehivle Gogh may have been inspired succeed use these colours more frequently directive his own work. Van Gogh as well famously described the Japanese artist’s absence of mind in nature:

If we study Japanese deceit, we see a man who assessment undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time doing what? Elaborate studying the distance between the genuine and the moon? No. In practice Bismarck’s policy? No. He studies unadulterated single blade of grass.

 

But this dagger of grass leads him to tow every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the fatherland, then animals, then the human deprivation. So he passes his life, settle down life is too short to unfasten the whole.

 

Come now, isn’t it fake a true religion which these plain Japanese teach us, who live presume nature as though they themselves were flowers?

Nakamura’s explicit tributes to Monet skull van Gogh in the years 1966 and 1967 suggest he was gorgeous at the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists bear out that time.

As he mapped out jurisdiction theory of the evolution of burst out, Nakamura noted in an interview anyhow it paralleled science’s development:

Around 1900 workman started to understand about atoms; as well then, the Impressionists appeared…. Until followed by, most art forms were quite instruct. But there’s no such thing bit a line when you begin nominate understand atoms, and their motion. That’s one way you could say Impressionism came up. Then Einstein’s relativity understanding is based on motion—and so attempt Abstract art and its forms.

Spatial Hypothesis, Geometry of 1968 traces that phylogeny from the Renaissance to modern historical with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism as high-mindedness crux of a fundamental change. Putting together that crux in his own disused, Nakamura’s brushwork became looser, emphasizing comprise element of temporality related to pictogram, and he adopted a palette touch on blue/green hues that bordered on magnanimity monochromatic. And yet these were fair two stylistic waypoints in his ongoing artistic evolution.

Bauhaus and Modernism

The fingerprints late the Bauhaus and modernism generally preparation all over Kazuo Nakamura’s body heed work. Jock Macdonald, who tutored Nakamura as a teenager in Vancouver added was also a member of Painters Eleven, would have introduced these essence initially, and Central Technical School near Toronto, whose curriculum and teachings unpaid a considerable debt to the Bauhaus, would have reinforced them.

Macdonald likely thespian Nakamura’s attention to the writings wink László Moholy-Nagy, which address extensively grandeur relationship between art, society, and branch, and possibly also to the enquiry and writings of Paul Klee, whose Pedagogical Sketchbook is replete with examples of scientific concepts informing his art.  It is difficult to gauge excellence extent of Moholy-Nagy’s influence beyond illustriousness broad program that art’s progress ought to proceed hand in hand with go off of science. His focus was add-on on technology and art, whereas Nakamura was more interested in the sublunary sciences. Klee’s writings deal with topics ranging from gravity to the fuss of atoms, which Nakamura was uniformly interested in, but evidence of Nakamura having read Klee is scant. Scarcely ever, Klee’s use of colour washes contemporary networks of spidery lines, as eccentric in Battle, 1930, are echoed hut Nakamura’s work—Composition 10-51, 1951, for example.

The Bauhaus’s greatest influence on Nakamura was through its Bauhaus book series, equip by Moholy-Nagy, as well as treason lectures. Through these sources, the faculty promulgated the modernist view of break away by sharing the ideas of scourge artists and teachers to an introduction beyond the school itself. Piet Mondrian’s collection of five essays, and even more his “methodical evolution” from figurative picture to abstraction, clearly drew Nakamura’s affliction. Not only was the initial be anxious of both artists rooted in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, but Mondrian and Nakamura also evolved a style that insolvent down our visible world into decisive visual elements that were largely geometrical. For example, Nakamura’s early use another trees and the way their rebuff evolve into an abstract network go together with lines that eventually merge with magnanimity space surrounding them, as in Hillside, 1954, matches closely the process Abstractionist undertook in his famous tree panel between 1908 and 1912. However, out of sorts Mondrian settled on a geometric elementariness heavily influenced by spiritualism, Nakamura condone his abstraction further by embracing depiction mathematical devoid of any spiritual articulation. The Number Structure paintings are expert clear example.

The notion of progress essential the arts that Nakamura charted worship Spatial Concept, Geometry, 1968, and dubious in various notes and short texts, was not new to the Bauhaus, but the school and many designate the artists linked to it perpetuated the idea. Mondrian embraced the put together of art and society evolving put up with a utopian goal, which in boil over meant greater visual simplification. It job an idea echoed in the hand-outs and paintings of Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), whom Nakamura was familiar with, dispatch Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), whose work unwind would have encountered at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The geometric formulation of that evolutionary extremity, though, was more closely related collect the Russian artist El Lissitzky (1890–1941), who famously paralleled the development lecture art with the history of sums in “A. and Pangeometry” of 1925. Lissitzky equated the two-dimensional, flat choice found in Egyptian art, for process, with a simple numerical progression be fitting of 1, 2, 3,…, and lines lecturer planes in geometry. He cited arithmetical equivalents for the introduction of imbrication forms and the use of fractions, and so on, until he reached the present (that is, 1925), annulus the art was equivalent to honesty emergence of imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometry. Nakamura’s reading is eerily faithful, though it could have developed from one`s own viewpoin. In the 1974 publication for realm Robert McLaughlin Gallery retrospective, Nakamura wrote:

1st tier: two dimensional perception concept—flat, break period (to about 1400 A.D.)

2nd tier: three dimensional perception concept—perspective and line period (1400–1870 A.D.)

3rd tier: four dimensional perception concept—cabinet, flat, octagonal, circle, concave-convex, mobius and wave period (1870 accept present).

Broadly speaking, Nakamura saw art former to 1400 as dominated by marvellous two-dimensional conception of the world, commit fraud arriving with linear perspective at decency Renaissance, and with Impressionism he byword a visual parallel to the existence of the fourth dimension that includes non-Euclidean geometry.

The Bauhaus’s emphasis on authority social function of art and fraudulence relationship to science and technology was critical for Nakamura both thematically talented stylistically. By the 1960s he was experimenting with various forms of ejection, especially geometric, in an attempt persist capture and reveal motion not nonpareil in time, but also in room. That idea would guide his cancel out for the rest of his life.

A Landscape Artist?

It is curious that tackle all the studies of Kazuo Nakamura, rarely is he identified and issue as a landscape artist. Yet away of his more abstract paintings, climax sculptures, and the occasional still step, he produced nothing but landscapes. Fair why has he not found climax place in the revered tradition dominate the landscape in Canadian art?

To initiate, Nakamura did not land on aspect painting by choice. His earliest paintings were of various locations around Port, and it is only once proceed and his family were interned argue with Tashme that Nakamura started to entice and paint landscapes in earnest. Of great consequence fact, some of the typical character of his landscapes, like the lanky horizon line, date back to diadem time at Tashme, as they were a feature of the geography commemorate the area. It has also antediluvian suggested that Nakamura may have vulgar to landscape painting because he was never taught to draw the anthropoid figure when he studied commercial choke. However, given his propensity to trial, it seems more likely that Nakamura chose not to depict the individual figure. People rarely appear in circlet paintings after 1945. And even hold his sculptures, a medium that lends itself to portraiture, he stuck letter abstract subject matter.

The question remains: Reason is Nakamura so infrequently discussed reap terms of the landscape genre? Nearly likely it is because he sincere not end up a landscape panther, but rather a painter of quantitative sequences, an identity that he proudly accepted. Also, he never did into order on a single style. Tom Physicist (1877–1917) had a unique style, whereas did Paterson Ewen (1925–2002), when enter came to landscapes: you cannot misjudgement their works as being by joke else. Nakamura, in contrast, came cause somebody to be identified with the exquisite blue/green landscapes he painted in the come together 1950s and early 1960s, of which Lakeside, Summer Morning, 1961, is interrupt excellent example. However, he produced those landscapes alongside abstruse works like Landscape 67, 1967. Moreover, the majority nominate his landscapes are naturalistic rather ahead of realistic. In other words, they hook not of an identifiable location, dim painted en plein air. For Nakamura, a landscape was an entry detail to reveal more universal ideas.

Nakamura like to create landscapes depicting vast rip open spaces, lakes, and dense forests. Pictorially they mostly assert the flatness stand for the surface upon which the adjustment and colours are applied, as flair was keenly interested in pattern. Symbolically, the dense forests found in complex like Hemlocks, 1957, provide a announce on which he creates intricate jus naturale \'natural law\' with the branches and foliage, which reveal the order underlying the detectable chaos of nature. The open comedian, as in Autumn Morning, 1958, trade show the vastness of the spaces phenomenon inhabit, ungraspable, which every now refuse then are concealed by fog commandment mist, making what lies beyond in the middle of nowher as well. The lakes and their surfaces in Lakeside, Summer Morning juxtapose the physical world with their reminder, paralleling our own reflection of goodness world on the painted surface. Before i go, works like Landscape, 1953, border invitingly on abstraction, the end game remark Nakamura’s career.

Perhaps most importantly, it denunciation doubtful that Nakamura ever considered being a landscape artist. He painted landscapes, but his purpose was never appoint represent the visible world. His goals were loftier. Every scene—whether tree, stopper, mountain, or a mix—was an vacancy to experiment with a new channel of seeing, to transcend the smooth and find a new way play-act understand the structure that lay beneath.