Inspiration from the lotus kingdom

By Victoria Gail-White
Advertiser Art Critic

•	'Lotus Potpourri' Watercolor Paintings and Photographs by Paul Nagano 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturdays, through Jan. 31 bibelot gallery 738-0368

Lotuses connect to Greek legends and Buddhist iconography. For Nagano, or any artist, they can be a symbolic fountainhead of ideas in their buds, blooms, pods, seeds and roots. He portrays these stages diagrammatically in the painting "Learning the Parts of the Lotus," which reveals his affection and appreciation of the plant.

Nagano was born and reared in Honolulu. He now divides his time between Boston, Bali, Indonesia, and Hawai'i. He has been exhibiting his artwork, primarily landscape paintings, in the United States and Indonesia since 1972 and began earning his living as an artist in 1989.

In a pun, Nagano refers to his recent works as "SymBALIst" — a fusion of Symbolism, Impressionism and Japanese Nanga painting enhanced by the rich spiritual culture and landscapes of Bali. It is there — where he has lived and traveled since 1984 — Nagano, too, has blossomed.

It is in Bali, where the lotus is abundant, religious rituals and dances are a regular occurrence, gamelan music echoes in your head for hours after listening and the costumes and masks make life seem more mythical than realistic, that Nagano's sketches and watercolors become fused with an enchantment all their own. In 1997, this same magic cast a spell on him while he was painting.

"Before I turned 60, I was working on a sketch of a temple, temple steps and a festival," Nagano says.

"I began to work on a large transformation of it, and it refused to translate. Everything began changing. A woman was walking up the steps and suddenly turned around and walked down, tilted. The painting began painting itself in a way.

"After a while I asked myself, do I try to correct this or go on with it? I decided to let it lead me wherever it would lead me."

Nagano credits this experience with turning his representational landscape paintings into more internal landscapes. "From then on I began to think about everything in a different way and create compositions far less conventionally. There's no gravity. Things can float, they can be upside down, and they can tilt. They don't have to be the same size or in proportion to anything."

For him, this is a tremendous liberation.

And it is that liberation that is obvious in this body of work. Nagano intersperses a muted palette of floral colors with black and white checkered poleng cloth parasols in "ParasoLotus" and in the darker "Night Fall: A Dog Barks." The works are smaller than his usual half-sheets of paper.

Dogs, monkeys, bulls, chickens, egrets, herons and grasshoppers appear in Nagano's works and enrich the narrative aspects of his paintings. Dancers, musicians, rice fields, rivers and bathers are suspended in his visions, sometimes overlapping each other, sometimes alone.

"Fearless Artist" is a humorous painting of a grasshopper that appears to have chewed the images of a temple roof, a hand in a mudra (a symbolic, ritualistic gesture of the hands), and its own self-portrait out of a lotus leaf. While out sketching one day by a lotus pond, Nagano noticed the insect was busy chewing its own sketch.

In "Rising and Falling," a large head of Buddha with a headdress of lotus petals ascends from a lotus pond and, nearby, a hand rises out, gesturing in a mudra. The stems of lotus behind the head bend and sway in an asymmetrical rhythmic pattern.

Nagano's twenty-nine photographs of lotuses intensify the colors, shapes and composition of the 10 watercolor paintings hanging between them. There is a sense of poetic buoyancy in the exhibit. And although Nagano now works harder and longer to achieve that lightness, he is enthusiastic about being in a world in which almost anything is possible.