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The Honolulu Advertiser

Posted on: Sunday, April 10, 2005

Artist's works exude elegance

David C. Farmer
Special to The Advertiser

Kapi'olani Community College's Koa Gallery's 2005 KOA Award recipient Harry Tsuchidana, one of Hawai'i's authentic living masters, is well known for his seemingly antithetical works: cool, abstract paintings and sensuous drawings of the female form.

The "Stage" series of works by Harry Tsuchidana, which is part of the "Full Spectrum" exhibit at Koa Gallery at Kapi'olani Community College, are horizontal canvasses with vertical elements. Several of the canvasses, all acrylic, have identical titles. Clockwise, from top left: "The Stage 2001," "The Stage 2001," "The Stage 2001-04," "The Stage 2001-05." The exhibit is on display through April 15.

Photos by Loren K.D. Farmer


'Harry Tsuchidana: Full Spectrum'

10 a.m.-4 p.m. weekdays;

10 a.m.-2 p.m. Saturdays, through April 15

Koa Gallery, Kapi'olani Community College

This exhibition displays both to good effect and ultimately synthesizes the apparently irreconcilable.

This year's KOA Award for lifelong achievement in the visual arts honors not only Tsuchidana but also an important chapter in the development of fine art in Hawai'i since 1929.

After serving in the army in Japan during the Korean War, Tsuchidana took classes at the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C.

In 1956, he moved to New York and trained at the Brooklyn Museum on the G.I. Bill. There he met and became friends with fellow Hawai'i artists Satoru Abe, Jerry Okimoto, Bob Ochikubo, Isami Doi and Tadashi Sato, all of whom were profoundly influenced by the emerging abstract expressionist school.

Doi's influence was especially profound on this generation of Nisei artists, who are now rightfully regarded as the treasured guardians of mid-20th century national and international artistic expression. Both Abe and Sato were past recipients of KOA Awards.

Since 1955, Tsuchidana's work has been widely shown in galleries and exhibitions here and on the Mainland. Last fall's Japanese Cultural Center self-titled exhibition — his first solo exhibition in 15 years — invoked the zodiac signs of Gemini and Monkey and his family's Japanese home prefecture, Kumamoto Ken. The juxtapositions define his playful personality and inventive work.

"Full Spectrum" presents his most recent and fully realized work, including his "Stage" series, which pursues a fascinating strategy he first began to plot and explore in the 1970s.

His paintings' abstract, interlocking forms are blocks of muted, elegant color combinations — various values of grays, salmon red, blue — that, when mixed, include all six major colors of the spectrum, the source reference of the exhibition's title.

The horizontal canvasses with vertical elements evoke exterior and interior geometric structures and space, the stuff that stimulates the subconscious imagination and produces haunting virtual after-images.

What these sophisticated images may suggest are music and the ocean's edge, but also skies and landscape and the earth seen from above, the weathered surfaces of some wooden edifices lost in the desert.

The viewer must bring a meditative and contemplative attention to these images, especially the edges of the canvas and the interiors — where the many layers of under-paint peek through in a contained riot of blue, purple, turquoise, red, yellow and black.

These are works that dance and sing and celebrate understated relationships: relationships between subtle complementary colors.

These are works where the musical and poetic tools of rhythm, repetition and movement serve the visual medium with an amazing grace.

Part of Tsuchidana's daily morning regime consists of selecting a photo gleaned from men's magazines collected from his frequent trips to Las Vegas — an image he finds evocative at the moment — and then using it to execute a quick, semi-blind contour drawing from the photo.

These bold and seemingly effortless acrylic, ink, pencil and wash nude figure drawing/paintings are on display, some of the less erotic examples on the gallery walls, the slightly more daring in a discreet folder, the most daring in notebooks available for perusal only upon request.

After bathing in the experience of his cerebral but deeply felt conundrums of form, space and light, what is the attentive viewer to make of these graphic drawings of the female form on single sheets of paper as well as more intimate sketchbooks, all sensual, some extremely erotic?

Or do they perhaps also speak of an earthy and erotic energy not immediately apparent, but just as present in the more restrained and stringent canvases?

Once again, just as the individual canvasses comment upon and illuminate each other, so the experience of viewing these drawings brings a new eye to the paintings, a sensation of re-vision in a deeper and more profound mode.

The apparent division of the nudes compared to the paintings dissolves in the realization that they also speak of this artist's abiding interest in and fascination with the feminine principle, energy and fascination that richly inform his nonobjective works as well.

What all his work shares in common also is a deft, painterly love of texture and impasto, an unerring grasp of subtle color manipulation, and an exquisite and delicate sense of linear and spatial design.

This exhibition provides a worthy celebration of the bedrock in all of Tsuchidana's work: the joy of seeing and feeling, the exhilaration of being truly alive.

David C. Farmer holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in painting and drawing and a master's in Asian and Pacific art history from the University of Hawai'i-Manoa.