Veteran artists chronicle joys of the journey

By Victoria Gail-White
Special to The Advertiser

•	Selected Works by Bumpei Akaji 'Post-Tattoo': Works by Kandi Everett, Don Ed Hardy and Michael Malone 8:30 a.m.-4 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays 8:30 a.m.-6 p.m. Fridays Through Sept. 7 Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center 999 Bishop St. 526-0232

Born on Kaua'i, his journey to art was a circuitous one, from studying with artists Hon Chew Hee, Isami Doi and Reuben Tam in his youth to joining the 100th Battalion of the 442nd Infantry Regiment in 1943. His mother wanted him to be an accountant. But Akaji knew, even as a child, that he was made to follow a less-traveled and often bumpy path.

After the war, Akaji remained in Florence, Italy, and studied art. On a Fulbright Fellowship, he continued his lessons in sculptural techniques and mosaics.

He returned to Hawai'i and in 1951 was awarded one of the first master of fine arts degrees from the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.

Akaji learned welding from a fellow veteran after graduation and embarked on a 50-year career as a sculptor.

His larger commissioned works have enriched Fort DeRussy, Beretania Street (opposite the State Capitol), 1000 Bishop St. and other sites. His style was distinct and straightforward, at once modern and primitive.

In this exhibit, Akaji's determined spirit is revealed in 50 copper, brass and bronze works of sculpture and fabricated metal patina bas-relief painting dating from 1957 to 2001, as well as many undated works.

Akaji's sculptures are a feast of shape, size, color, texture and structure, organic and architectural. Some of the figures are linear metal rods — bones without flesh or gender, suggesting not a specific person but humankind.

However elongated, singular or crowded with stick figures the smaller sculptural works are, the harmonious, choreographed constructions make your eyes dance.

The midsize sculptural works are evocative of an alphabet born of the artist's many strong opinions about life. Forceful three-dimensional letters curl, enclose, connect and reach skyward. His larger works are powerful totems.

Akaji painted with patinas, in a palette that ranged from blacks and burgundy browns to lighter verdigris against warm, reddish coppers and blonder bronzes. His abstract metal bas-reliefs are like textural maps of his inner journey. Our eyes move around nebulous forms that recall mandalas, mountains, clouds and coral.

Many of the works are untitled. Akaji believed the owners should name the pieces, because they had to live with them. And he had no qualms about not selling a work of art to someone he felt shouldn't have it.

His work, overall, was physical. Blow torches, shears, saws and hammers must have pounded and hissed with furious intensity from his Sand Island studio. Their echoes resound here.

Wearable art

Like Akaji, Kandi Everett, Don Ed Hardy and Michael Malone were mesmerized by art in their youth and all achieved recognition.

Unlike Akaji, they took on the challenge of working in the ridiculed and neglected medium of tattoo. Their parents probably would have been happy if they had focused on fine art.

In the past 20 years or so, these artists have had the satisfaction of watching their neglected genre evolve from a peripheral form of personal expression to a more mainstream statement of individuality.

But they are only innovators and keepers of a flame that is prehistoric; tattoo is one of the oldest art forms on the planet.

Hardy began drawing tattoos on his friends when he was 10 years old. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute and decided to study tattoo with masters in Japan and Hawai'i. Although he lives on O'ahu, he continues to run a tattoo shop in San Francisco.

"As the practice has evolved into one of largely custom commissions, the tattoo artist must become proficient in a wide variety of styles and subject matter," Hardy writes in the introduction to the artists' brochure. "All this strengthens the artist's most important tool, intuition."

Hardy's dozen art works in this exhibit exude his eclectic and intuitive sensibilities. "I like the tension of working with a real immediacy," he says. Most of the time, he paints in the manner of ancient Asian painters — without a preliminary sketch — to focus his attention on the energy and power of the images.

Using Japanese and Chinese brushes, Hardy demonstrates the spontaneous way he works, with competence and control. Extensively self-taught in Buddhist, Taoist and South American Indian philosophies and deities, as well as Western art and artists, Hardy's work fuses East and West. His compositions connect deities from mythology and religion with images from his childhood in the late 1940s and '50s in Southern California — beach and surf, cowboys, hot rods, tattoos, Asian and beatnik art — often articulating his sense of humor.

His 81-by-51-inch acrylic painting on Tyvek, "The Great Pretender" is, he says, "a composite self-portrait floating through a landscape. I float between styles all the time. It used to bother me, but I gave that up."

Now, much like a multilinguist, Hardy has the advantage of using whatever style and images best communicate his idea. He calls "The Great Pretender" a ghost- writer painting because he uses white outlines on a dark blue-black background. A mass of wings, arrows, paintbrushes, flames, books, horns, a tail and an eye completely cover a central figure surrounded by a mountainous landscape.

In "Black Waves," Hardy creates a luminous, tumultuous blue-black night sea with white and turquoise waves suggesting sea monsters in a storm.

You may remember Hardy's 500-foot "2000 Dragons" scroll painting exhibited at Linekona earlier this year. It, too, was on Tyvek, a medium Hardy has championed.

Originally used for home insulation, Tyvek is a synthetic cloth- or paper-like product made of high-density, super-fine polyethylene fibers resistant to water, rot, mildew, chemicals and aging. Hardy beautifully mounts his large Tyvek paintings on silk scrolls.

His dragons will appear on a new line of garments launched this fall at a fashion show in Los Angeles. He also is scheduled to exhibit in Oaxaca, Mexico, and Kansas City, Mo., in 2005.

Kandi Everett, a tattoo artist since 1977, is an active member of the Honolulu Printmakers. Her provocative, sensuous and humorous style includes "White Chicks on Speed," a series of nine works using graphite, colored pencil, watercolor and India ink on gessoed paper in which she juxtaposes a small, yellow, baby chick with popped-out, bloodshot eyes against sharks, a cat, eagle, octopus, skull, snake, spider, toddler and a wolf.

"Each one is a story," Everett says. The title came from overhearing two guys talking about white chicks on speed. "Paranoia goes along with taking drugs. So I thought, 'What would make a chick paranoid?' " The series, though a bit scary, is also comical.

"I like laughing," Everett says. "I find it to be therapeutic for the ills of the day."

Her Southern fundamentalist upbringing echoes through "The Fence": 13 7-by-30-inch mixed-media works on paper stretching across two walls at eye level. A black horizontal fence runs along, with an occasional red devil climbing up on the other side of it.

An almost floor-to-ceiling watercolor and India ink on transparent paper offers us a glimpse of Everett's sensuous nature. A large big toe is submerged in a soft blue transparent color field of water as a koi ascends in "Tapping Toe Gently. Koi Will Sucking Come. Feels Good For You."

Michael Malone's six works include three brilliantly colored, amazingly detailed watercolors based on Japanese folk tales (reminiscent of ukiyo-e prints) and three kites. The cloth tails on the kites were hand-marbled by Francesca Passalacqua (Don Ed Hardy's spouse).

According to his artist statement, when he was a child, Malone's father would make kites, and he would paint on them. "We would fly them ... until the kite was just a spot in the sky. In the end, the kites would break free and fly away, carrying a few hundred yards of string and a kid's painting of a cool rocket ship or a Jolly Roger, away to God knows where. I love kites."

Hardy and Malone met in New York and worked together in California. When Malone moved to Hawai'i, he trained Everett as his apprentice. Malone is retired now and lives in Chicago.

What is not visible is this exhibit is the way these artists developed their 2D legs. If you can imagine working on skin, with all its incongruities, for more than 20 years, you can begin to appreciate how joyful painting without inflicting physical pain on the paper must be.

Gallery tours are offered the first Thursday of every month at noon.