Artists of Hawaii: Volume One - Nineteen Painters and Sculptors 9780824887339

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Artists of Hawaii

Artists of Hawaii Volume One

NINETEEN PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS Photographs by FRANCIS HAAR Interviews by PRITHWISH NEOGY with an Introduction by Jean Chariot

THE STATE FOUNDATION ON CULTURE &THE ARTS AND THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF HAWAII/Honolulu

Copyright s-1974 by T h e University Press of Hawaii All rights reserved Library of C o n g r e s s Catalog Card N u m b e r 7 4 - 7 8 8 6 1 ISBN 0 - 8 2 4 8 - 0 3 3 8 - 8 M a n u f a c t u r e d in the United States of A m e r i c a Book design

by Roger J.

Eggers

Contents

Foreword

vii

Preface

ix

Introduction

xi

The

Artists Isami Doi Madge Tennent

3 9

Satoru Abe

19

Edward M. Brownlee

26

Kenneth Bushnell

34

Jean Chariot

42

J. Halley Cox

50

Juliette May Fraser

58

H o n - C h e w Hee

66

Sueko M. Kimura

74

John I. Kjargaard

82

Ben Norris

88

Louis Pohl

96

Shirley Russell

104

Tadashi Sato

112

Willson Stamper

120

Edward A. Stasack

128

Tseng Yu-ho

136

John Young

144

vìi

Foreword

This book had its beginnings in a grant from the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts to Francis Haar, one of the finest among Hawaii's fine photographerartists. T h e idea was to look beyond the surface for the essence of what is beautiful and important in Hawaii, beyond her scenic marvels and the enchanting faces of her peoples, and to search for the images in which this spirit is recorded and reflected in the work of Hawaii's artists. Naturally it was not possible to include in this single (we hope only the first) volume the dancers and actors and poets and musicians w h o h a v e b e e n captured by Francis Haar's inquisitive and empathic lens. There was not space enough for the other of Hawaii's visual artists, her uniquely characteristic ceramists, weavers, glassblowers, featherworkers, and other craftsmen; nor was it possible even to expand the scope of this first book to e m b r a c e other, equally qualified, painters and sculptors and printmakers. The decision to publish the visual artists first, before the performing artists, was m a d e v e r y early. Hawaii simply has a greater number of visual artists. We like to believe that one of the explanations for this fact is the influence Hawaii's Art-in-StateBuildings program is exerting by creating conditions favorable to the fully professional work of visual artists. Under the law that makes this development possible, the State F o u n d a t i o n c a n c o m m i s s i o n or acquire

works by local artists, to be located on all the islands for the enjoyment of the public and as a contribution to Hawaii's urban environment. T o finance this program, one percent of all legislative appropriations for educational and other State buildings is set aside in a special fund. Although the State Foundation, the official State arts agency of Hawaii—funded by State appropriations and the recipient of substantial federal grants, mostly from the National Endowment for the Arts—stimulates and supports a multiplicity of programs and activities in all art forms, no program is as vigorous as that for the visual arts. For undertaking the demanding task of interviewing the artists in their studios and setting down in their own words their reflections on their work and the influences that shaped them, our profound gratitude is proffered to Prithwish Neogy, the editor of this opus. T o Jean Chariot, w h o in his charming Introduction so eloquently shares his deep insights and loving and encompassing understanding of Hawaii's p e o p l e , landscape, culture, and art, w e take the occasion to express again our limitless admiration and aloha. . W e thank our cosponsor and publisher, The University Press of Hawaii and its director, Robert Sparks, for the opportunity to participate in this wonderful venture. And finally, w e thank the Board of the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts

and its untiring chairman, Masaru Yokouchi, and the State finance director, Hiram K. Kamaka, for enabling us to m a k e this volume one of Hawaii's contributions to the celebration of the bicentennial of the A m e r ican Revolution. Alfred Preis, F.A.I.A. Executive Director State Foundation on Culture and the Arts

ix

Preface

In 1964 Francis Haar conceived of a publication of p h o t o g r a p h s of representative w o r k s and related ambience of painters and sculptors long associated with Hawaii. For this first v o l u m e , after consultation with s e v e r a l eminent artists of Hawaii, eighteen n a m e s were eventually c h o s e n from a list of contemporary painters and sculptors, all professionally well known for at least a decade. These artists were interviewed at some length, but without the aid of a set of standard questions. In editing the texts, care was taken to let the emphasis and the manner of speaking of each individual stand. Initially reluctant to verbalize, the artists proved to be e l o q u e n t in revealing their aesthetic, technical, and philosophical preoccupations. All of the photographs of the artists in their habitats and of their works of art were made by Francis Haar. To these eighteen artists it seemed natural and necessary to add Isami Doi, recognized as an exemplar and a spiritual precursor among artists in Hawaii. A review by Jean Chariot of Doi's life and work accompanies representative examples of his art. Dr. Chariot has also kindly provided an evocative Introduction to the art and artists of the Islands. The authors acknowledge with thanks the financial assistance of the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and the Honolulu Advertiser. Grateful a c k n o w l e d g m e n t is made also to: the Bishop M u s e u m for per-

mission to reproduce a portrait of Bernice Pauahi Bishop and a photograph by Francis Haar of the Bloxam Temple Image; Bishop Museum Press for permission to reproduce the cover photograph from Hawaiian Petroglyphs by J. Halley Cox with E d w a r d A. Stasack (Honolulu: Bishop M u s e u m Press, 1970); the Honolulu A c a d e m y of Arts for permission to reproduce a painting by Tavernier, a photograph of Isami Doi, and prints by Webber, Choris, and Arago; to the Hawaiian Mission Children's Society for permission to reproduce a Lahainaluna woodcut published in Ka Lama Hawaii, May 16, 1834; and to the Honolulu Star-Bulletin for permission to reprint an article by J e a n Chariot. Prithwish Neogy

xi

Introduction

It would be incongruous to pretend that Hawaii, for over ten years the Fiftieth State of the Union, is still the same exquisite Pearl of the Pacific whose palm trees in the nineteenth century beckoned to Mark Twain with magic unsurpassed. For the few w h o land here still believing in Mark Twain's mirage, our newly hatched highrise Hawaii is a harsh eye-opener. More destructive than lava, a m a n - m a d e flow of concrete mangles and buries palm trees and banyan trees, razes pagan temple platforms, fills up antique mullet ponds. In their place hotels mushroom high. Their disregard of aesthetic or, worse, their aesthetic of carnival, illustrates nothing more noble than the greed that brought them into being. An artist just landed in Hawaii, unless he be unusually sensitive, need not modify what style of art he learned in Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York. Here as there the newcomer, insulated between familiar concrete walls, may live and work without becoming aware of a more mysterious Hawaii. Though a chain of islands, our state, as concerns aesthetics, is in no way insular. It has played host to some among the giants of modern art. Josef Albers, fresh from Yale, taught at our university. Between sessions, in the relative wilds of the island of Hawaii, Albers would sit facing the Pacific, sketching. Sketching not any recognizable seascape but overlappings of horizontal planes that in their double-entendre raised

the timed motions of waves to a plane of timelessness. The University of Hawaii is the only place w h e r e M a x Ernst e v e r taught, the place where, in a lecture that lasted for over three hours, he improvised magical variations on the story of the birth of Surrealism. Genesis narrated by the Creator! When our new state was asked to send to Washington the likeness of a local hero, it chose Father Damien, missionary to the Molokai lepers. A state-sponsored contest awarded the commission to the Venezuelan sculptress Marisol Escobar. Her Damien is to date the only modern work a m o n g the bourgeois bronzes in Washington's Hall of Fame. As is made obvious by leafing through this anthology, Hawaii's resident artists are well informed about what goes on in the enclaves where styles are brewed, mostly New York and Paris. Nevertheless, there are very sound reasons to single out their works as distinct from those of any other group. Contradicting the tidy picture of the Fiftieth State racing to progress nose to nose with the other fortynine, Hawaii, like it or not, remains unique. Yesterday the crust of our chain of isles was covered with gently swaying palms; today, with hotels scraping the skies. No matter, our islands are only the tip-top of giant submarine mountains anchored deep in the primeval ooze. Similarly, modern Hawaii cannot be culturally w r e n c h e d apart from its prehistory.

As yet nameless, our islands had not known man until about A.D. 600, w h e n heroic voyagers beached their dugout c a n o e s on these shores. Throughout the following millennium, its o c e a n - l o c k e d people bec a m e a unified race, their culture, however complex, a culture of the Stone Age. In Europe and Asia Stone Age cultures recede into the past, so fogged by distance as to be forgotten. In Hawaii prehistory happened only yesterday. Prehistoric Hawaiians felt all about them, and above and below, the presence of gods and godlings. They walked through nature on tiptoe lest they should inadvertently upset its delicate ecology. Thus Hawaiian nature, spared through a millennium the heavy hoofs of cattle and the spiked boots of civilizers, had leisure enough to breed delicate variations on the t h e m e of bird plumage and aerial roots. Man added to the landscape his art. The best among Hawaiian w o o d carvings rival African sculptures at conjuring surrealist visions by means of stocky cubist forms. Together with the f a m e d Hawaiian feather capes, monumental sculpture remained the appanage of chiefs and gods exclusively. Scratched on rocks, petroglyphs were the art of the people. Museum men are at a loss how to fit them in their orderly halls. Still today one discovers them, half by search and half by chance, on boulders, under boulders, in the darkest dark of low-ceilinged caves. In

B L O X A M T E M P L E I M A G E . B e r n i c e P. B i s h o p M u s e u m .

p l a c e s o n c e crucial, their c r i s s c r o s s lines by the h u n d r e d s tattoo the s m o o t h skin of p a hoehoe lava fields as far as the eye c a n see. Display m e a n t so little to their m a k e r s that s o m e petroglyphs, set on underwater rocks, s u r f a c e only at low tide. Not i n t e n d e d as art for art's sake, petrog l y p h s w e r e mostly meant as p r o u d footnotes to j o u r n e y s by land or sea. At t h e t i m e that our imported alphabet r e n d e r e d petroglyphs obsolete, they w e r e close to b e c o m i n g true ideograms. Their s e n s e lost, t h e y still a c h i e v e a m e s s a g e of beauty. Pictures of dogs a n d men, birds a n d blrdmen, f a n s a n d sails a n d paddles c o u l d r e m i n d the sophistic a t e of t h e d o o d l e s of a Paul Klee, w e r e It not that wit Is in no w a y of their e s s e n c e , but rather a skeletal majesty. H o w e v e r u n c l a s s l c a l In f o r m a n d in Intent, H a w a i i a n prehistoric art proffers to t h e local artist Its ancestral w i s d o m , as did to Europe the arts of G r e e c e a n d Rome. T h e native H a w a i i a n did not orient himself by nailing his world In s p r e a d - e a g l e posture b e t w e e n north and south, east a n d west. T w o directions sufficed: mauka, t o w a r d the mountains, a n d makai, t o w a r d t h e o c e a n . T h e s e w a y s still cling to our w a y s a n d w e feel disoriented, at least as regards east a n d west, t h e Orient a n d t h e O c c i d e n t . Equidistant our land from Asia a n d A m e r i c a , its people f u n n e l e d in from both s i d e s — c u l t u r a l l y w e b e l o n g to neither, but stand rather at a c r o s s r o a d b e t w e e n both continents. M a i n l a n d A m e r i c a k n o w s and c o l l e c t s Orl-

PETROGLYPH.

ental art, s u c h m a s t e r p i e c e s as t h e Scroll of the Emperors in B o s t o n or W e n C h e n g m l n g ' s ink l a n d s c a p e In K a n s a s C i t y . B r u s h e d on fragile silk or paper, t h e s e a c quire, w h e n s e e n side by side with sturdier O c c i d e n t a l oils, a rare taste as of s p i c e imported f r o m far-off fairy lands. Not so In our Hawaii. Here, most exotic p e r h a p s are s o m e of t h e E u r o p e a n m a s t e r pieces. For Europe Is farthest a w a y , w h i c h ever w a y a H a w a i i a n circles the globe. A n d not only In t e r m s of g e o g r a p h y . S h o w n at t h e H o n o l u l u A c a d e m y of Arts, C l a u d e M o n e t ' s late Waterlilies presupp o s e s t h e cozlly t e n d e d pond at Giverny, a shuffling of slippers, a folding stool a n d portable easel, and, u n k n o w n to t h e M a s ter, a g a r d e n e r paid to s e n d a Paris dealer w e e k l y bulletins on M o n e t ' s falling health,

XIII

on w h i c h t h e flux a n d reflux of t h e art m a r ket d e p e n d e d . Picasso's cubist Still Life of the 1910s is better u n d e r s t o o d in t e r m s of a M o n t m a r t r e that is not a n y m o r e : endless nocturnal disc u s s i o n s about art, quaffing Pernods at sidewalk c a f e tables, y o u n g art dealers n o s i n g their w a y to future w e a l t h as pigs w i s e to t h e spoor of buried truffles. T h e s e w a y s are far a w a y f r o m our ways. M o r e familiar a p p e a r the scrolls d i s p l a y e d in t h e Oriental w i n g of that s a m e A c a d e m y : Hundred Geese, traditionally attributed to M a Fen, or W e n C h e n g - m i n g ' s Seven Juniper Trees. Unlike the E u r o p e a n works, w h e n ass e s s e d against the peculiar m o r e s of our islands t h e s h o c k c o m e s f r o m t h e i m p a c t of genius, not f r o m any felt exoticism. T h e brushstroke, w i s e or wild, s w i t c h e s at will f r o m tangible o b j e c t to intangible mood, t h e painter t u r n s writer or else t h e writer, painter. Alternating with panels of o r c h i d leaves, or s k y - h i g h a b o v e c r a g g y cliffs, are b l o c k e d vertical c o l u m n s of calligraphy. If asked, m y C h i n e s e friends will d e c i p h e r their meaning, but I, true barbarian that I am, c a n only rejoice in their a b stract beauty. Oriental m a n has a w a y with ink that spells art regardless of intent, f r o m s u c h m a s t e r p i e c e s d o w n to the c h o p suey menu, or to the diagnosis t h a t t h e herb doctor, havingfelt both my pulses, " b r u s h e s " fountain pen in h a n d before grinding for m e with mortar a n d pestle most puzzling m e d i c i n e s .

As t h e West lent us Josef Albers a n d M a x Ernst, great artists f r o m A s i a — r a t e d as "living t r e a s u r e s " in their o w n c o u n t r i e s — h a v e lived, taught a n d w o r k e d in our Hawaii: t h e potters Shoji H a m a d a a n d T o y o K a n e s h i g e , Shiko M u n a k a t a t h e printmaker, t h e Indonesian painter Affandi. But it also is t r u e that t h e c h e a p e s t of Asiatic imports, paper c a r p f l o w n on B o y s ' Day, kites, dolls, s h a d o w puppets, s h o w h o w e v e r faintly t h e imprint of very great cultures. T o H a w a i i a n artists they m a y m e a n no less t h a n J a p a n e s e ukiyo-e p e n n y s h e e t s m e a n t to the F r e n c h impressionists. In 1 7 7 8 Captain C o o k d i s c o v e r e d t h e islands. A t t a c h e d to his c r e w w a s an artist, J o h n Webber. In our pictorial history W e b b e r stands as t h e sole outside witness to a H a waii as yet u n d i s t u r b e d by our brand of civilization. O n e c a n hardly hold it against him if, able t h o u g h he was, he failed to s h a k e off his e i g h t e e n t h - c e n t u r y m a n n e r i s m s a n d to be born anew. His Young Woman c r o w n e d with feather leis is a c h a r m i n g conceit, with a whiff of Gainsborough's lightheaded s e n s u o u s n e s s . His Man of the Sandwich Islands, c r u s a d e r like, h e a d e n c a s e d in a helmet c a r v e d f r o m a gourd, t o p p e d with a p a n a c h e of ferns, ties in with t h e p r e - r o m a n t i c taste that a d d e d f a k e G o t h i c ruins to English g a r d e n s , to be gazed at in t h e moonlight. In 1816 a Russian imperial expedition under A d m i r a l v o n Kotzebue a n c h o r e d here. Ludvig C h o r i s w a s the artist on board. O l d

King K a m e h a m e h a , not k n o w i n g if t h e Russian w a r s h i p s m e a n t war or peace, r e c e i v e d Kotzebue's e m i s s a r i e s frigidly, s e a t e d B u d d h a w i s e o n t h e royal mat, w r a p p e d in a n a m ple c l o a k of black tapa, the native bark cloth. Choris w a s struck by t h e dignity, t h e s o lemnity, e m a n a t i n g f r o m t h e s a v a g e king. P e a c e it w a s to be. A g r e e i n g to p o s e for his portrait, K a m e h a m e h a c h a n g e d to pants, pleated linen shirt, o r a n g e silk necktie, a n d

W A M A N O F T H E S A N D W I C H I S L A N D S , IN A M A S K . E n g i a v i n g b a s e d o n a d r a w i n g by J o h n W e b b e r .

XIV

asserted, art can be a lie more truthful than the truth. The Pacific Paradise now, thanks to Choris, had its Eve. The task of creating its Adam fell to Jacques Arago, artist to a French expedition. His engraving, printed in full color, Officer of the King orchestrates a splendid harmony of brown skin, blue tattoos, and the insistent chord of reds and yellows struck by feather cape and helmet. Despite the savage

paraphernalia, memories of G r e e c e a n d Rome seen through the eyes of the French classicist Jacques Louis David imbue with heroic overtones the languid adolescent leaning on his spear. Kamehameha the Great was the last pagan king. About 1820, American Calvinist missionaries brought Christianity and the printing press. Choris and Arago, trained in Europe, were merely visitors to our islands. At the missionary school at Lahainaluna, Maui, were created, in the 1830s, the first works of art crafted by people who, by birth or by choice, lived in Hawaii; at least the first since the Stone Age. As remains true of petroglyphs, these works of art have no pretense to art. Their only aim is to preach and to instruct. Botany, zoology, anatomy, geography are their first concerns. Native s t u d e n t s e n g r a v e d sundry maps: of the world, of the islands, of the Holy Land. Also a profile of Diamond Head, a volcanic eruption that spews smoke and lava over a rocky landscape, two natives—male and female, dressed to taste—their backs turned for modesty's sake. The choice of motifs may have been a hesitant answer to the first inquiries of voyagers for something typical to bring back home.

WOMAN OF THE SANDWICH ISLANDS. Lithograph by Louis Choris.

an English sailor's red vest. When asked, he resolutely refused to change back to his native cloak. The dismayed artist felt he had come too late to ever know the real Hawaii! Choris was great enough an artist to compensate—as did Gauguin in Tahiti seventy years later—for the Pacific Paradise he had missed. His splendid lithograph Woman of the Sandwich Islands, barely based on life sketches, may be factually a lie, but as Degas

OFFICER OF THE KING (detail). Engraving by Jacques Arago.

The Lahainaluna prints are no dazzling performance. Better than that, they are true primitives, with what awkward charm comes from uncertain artisanship and total dedication.

XV

Some were done by natives, some by their missionary teachers. It is an impossible task to try and sift the ones from the others. As in all conquests, cultural or otherwise, the conqueror was not immune to native ways. By far the most "savage" among the Lahainaluna prints are the woodcuts that a wellmeaning missionary, Alonzo Chapin, carved to show Hawaiians the great mammals they had never known: zebra, giraffe, bison, lion, hippopotamus. By mid-nineteenth century, Hawaii had settled to its fate, civilization. Native games, sports, and dances were forbidden, frowned upon as pagan. Nudity was outlawed lest it offend the sensibilities of foreign ladies. The man in the street covered himself with rags that, at least, left him his freedom of movement. The sovereigns—noblesse oblige—had it worst.

HE

LION A

LION. Lahainaluna woodcut by Alonzo Chapin.

Kings meekly donned the absurd paraphernalia their royal "cousins" adopted in Europe: full-dress uniforms stiff with braids and buttons and frogs, hung with medals, strapped with bandoleers and a belt from which dangled a useless sword. They encased their bronzed hands in white gloves, donned helmets t o p p e d with spikes or plumes, with chin straps that framed in brass the dark cheeks, hairy with black mustaches and sideburns. For the queens it was even worse. Through most of the nineteenth century w o m e n ' s fashions went counterwise to the shape and needs of a healthy body. Crinolines, stuff draped over iron hoops, encased the legs; stays and corsets mashed the torsos. And in the 1880s, false derrieres b e c a m e the fashion. Honolulu, seat of the government, was little more than a village. Still, there were itinerant portrait painters who braved the inconvenience of a long ocean voyage for what meager market the capital offered. None found himself without customers, and none made a fortune at it. More artisans than artists, they copied with great application and indifferent success what they saw, and for this we should be grateful. Not unlike European court painters whose true trade was flattery, when portraying royalty none betrayed the bulk, the thick-lipped features and golden color of the unmistakably Hawaiian bodies of their august models. To the early sightseer Hawaii was mostly

BERNICE PAUAHI BISHOP. Portrait by Federico de Madrazo.

landscape. Webber, Choris, Arago, among others, sketched, lithographed, engraved excellent impressions of Hawaiian nature. Theirs was, however, an outsider's point of view. Men who lived in Hawaii, t h o u g h less highly trained than visiting artists, had leisure to feel in depth what they saw. There survives in their landscapes, not all of them masterpieces, traces of this unease that

xvi

m a d e p a g a n m a n cautiously h e d g e his w a y b e t w e e n water a n d fire, b e t w e e n a f a t h o m less o c e a n a n d b o t t o m l e s s lava pits. As stated, h o m e m a d e l a n d s c a p e s h a d h u m b l e b e g i n n i n g s in s o m e of t h e L a h a i n a -

V O L C A N I C SCENE. Jules Tavernier.

luna engravings. T h e n c a m e Charles Furn e a u x a n d Jules Tavernier, both in t h e first half of t h e nineteenth century. T h e y s p e c i a l ized in s c e n e s of v o l c a n i c activities, lava flows g l o w i n g red against the d e e p blue of

a f u l l - m o o n night. Admittedly their art falls short of their intent, a n d yet they must be praised for attempting an impossible feat. Their French c o n t e m p o r a r i e s f a v o r e d minimal subjects, the better to e m p h a s i z e their

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art. A Corot filtered skies of dawn or dusk through a gauze of light foliage; a Monet could paint fifteen oils with a single haystack for his model. Closer to Hawaii, the American landscapists who trekked through the Rockies and the West believed otherwise; the magnificence of the scenery was bound to uplift their art to heroic levels. Furneaux and Tavernier cast their lot with these. John La Farge, a major American painter, stayed here awhile in the late 1880s. When in Hilo, on the island of Hawaii, he visited F u r n e a u x w h o l a m e n t e d the fact that, though he had spent many years attempting to catch the magic of the volcanoes, still an elusive je-ne-sais-quoi eluded him. As articulate with words as he was outstanding with a brush, La Farge was one of the few writers of the period to suspect, under an unruffled surface of Victorian gentility, the seething netherworld of kahuna and gods his Hawaiian hosts had discreetly failed to mention. As a painter, La Farge proved less perceptive. In his tour of the Pacific islands he biased his sights toward a classical antiquity reborn. Dancing in glades or disrobing by the sea, his Polynesian maidens seem ready to take a dip in the Mediterranean rather than the Pacific. La Farge, a visitor, understandably clung to what he already knew rather than plunge into a world unknown. At the time, even Polynesians refrained from mentioning in public their u n a b a t e d pride in their own language and culture.

Privately, King Kalakaua was a staunch believer in the worth of his ancestral culture. His preference for native chants and hulas and, so it was rumored, pagan rites, was frowned upon by all do-gooders. Yet when the king commissioned a monument to Kamehameha the Great, it was from an American sculptor famed as a classicist,

FUNERAL OF LILIUOKALANI.

Etching by Hue

Luquiens.

T h o m a s R. G o u l d , a Bostonian living in Florence and totally unversed in the lore of the Pacific. Gould patterned his work after an antique Roman model, a marble of Caesar Augustus addressing his cohorts. The imperial toga sprouted feathers to become the native cloak that d r a p e s the Polynesian king.

xviii

For c l o s e to a century, G o u l d ' s Kamehameha, d a u b e d c h o c o l a t e a n d gold, w a s the only m o n u m e n t a l statue d i s p l a y e d in our islands. T o fill our allotted q u o t a of heroes, the n e w state, on 15 April 1965, sent its replica to W a s h i n g t o n as an unlikely c o m p a n i o n to Marisol's Damien. T h e next g e n e r a t i o n of artists brings us into this century. T h e r e w a s n o w a p l a c e for w e l l - r o u n d e d professionals w h o c o u l d turn out a portrait as well as a l a n d s c a p e — L i o n e l Walden, C h a r l e s William Bartlett, D. H o w a r d H i t c h c o c k . H i t c h c o c k ' s early works, s u b d u e d in their r a n g e of color, b l o s s o m in his later years into a mild version of i m p r e s s i o n i s m . Unlike T a v e r n i e r a n d Furneaux, H i t c h c o c k k n e w t h e v a l u e of m i n i m a l subject matter. S o m e of his loveliest l a n d s c a p e s are also t h e simplest, s u c h as a lone outrigger c a n o e b e a c h e d at l o w tide. A m o n g t h e artists w h o s e w o r k s w h o l l y b e l o n g to t h e t w e n t i e t h c e n t u r y a n d yet w h o do not c o m e within the s c o p e of this anthology, o n e m a y single out J o h n M. Kelly a n d H u e M. Luquiens, both k n o w n primarily as etchers. J o h n Kelly w a s an e x a c t i n g t e c h n i c i a n and, within his e t c h i n g craft, an expert on color. His P o l y n e s i a n f e m a l e s v i v a c i o u s l y set against b a c k g r o u n d s of tropical l e a v e s a n d flowers, loins c l a d in kikepa—\n Hollywood c a l l e d s a r o n g — s h a p e d his personal version of Hawaii a l o n g s i n u o u s lines of art nouveau. H u e Luquiens, m a s t e r of value contrasts, w a s c o n t e n t to w o r k within t h e r a n g e of

black to white. His Funeral of Queen Liliuokalani e t c h e d in 1917, r e m a i n s o n e of his most i m p r e s s i v e a c h i e v e m e n t s . It is a m o v ing e y e w i t n e s s a c c o u n t of t h e event that c l o s e s t h e history of t h e K i n g d o m of H a waii. J e a n Chariot

Isami Doi 1903-1965 Madge Tennent 1889-1972

3

Isami Doi

My first contact with Isami Doi, or at least with his art, predates by two decades my own awareness of Hawaii. In New York, in 1931, our w o r k s w e r e exhibited side by side in a most exclusive annual show, "Fifty Best Prints of the Year." His entry intrigued me. "The Bannister," a relief engraving, was a twisted, bemused version of his San Francisco habitat, a perspective rendering of the endless stairs one had to climb to reach the walk-up attic studios, This article, a review of a memorial show of Isami Dol's works held at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, appeared in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin November 30, 1966. It is reprinted here, with minor editorial changes by permission of the publisher.

the only sort of housing we young artists could afford in any big city. In the case of Isami Doi, the art and the man are as one. To paint meant for him more than an exercise in aesthetics. Encompassing as they now do the whole of his lifetime, his works are beaded together into a translucent recital of joys and sorrows, the stuff of a very special human life. Perhaps more clearly than is the case with most, an even bigger theme dominates this recital. It is an active spiritual search that gives a unified flavor to this diary written with line and color. Once Hemingway, in a gloomy mood, said that to be truthful all stories should end with death. In Hemingway's case, the end c a m e as a door slams shut. In Doi's case, the end was more like the opening of a door to allow in at last a full share of light and of air. Doi remains identified with his native Kauai. "Grassroots," "native son," are terms that have lost their freshness through political mouthings. Yet, in their pristine meaning they apply properly to Doi. Doi's story parallels that of that other master, Peter Breughel of Flanders. Breughel toured Italy when Michelangelo was still alive. He returned home more Flemish than ever. Doi's first models were the hills and cliffs of his Kauai. In New York he was featured by dealers and feted by collectors. The temptation crossed his path to become just another abstract expressionist. But his last pictures,

as were his first, were inspired by the hills and cliffs of his own Kauai. Content with their lot, Breughel and Doi, by so-called international s t a n d a r d s , remained provincial. But it is essential to remember that it was by their own choice. That is the very reason why they are true masters, while many an ambitious expatriate is forgotten. As told in his pictures the story of Doi flows smoothly, if not uneventfully. To divide its text into chapters is but a device that allows for clarity. Rather than a book to leaf through page after page, his lifework is more in the nature of a scroll to be unrolled. Here, even in a figure of speech, the duality of East and West that cohabit in his work is unavoidable. Young painters, the world over, meet and conquer love as a first aesthetic affirmation. Doi's youthful pictures, painted in muted duns and browns, have a discreet erotic quality. The loosening of the cincture, a favorite image of Greek poetry, finds here its Asiatic counterpart, the untying of the kimono belt. The peculiar modesty of the p r e s e n t a t i o n suits Doi w h o , throughout his life, was to avoid theatrics. In mid-course, one meets in his work deep drama and the resulting scars. The artist goes through a time of unbalance. To describe emotional wounds, Doi turns for this once to the paraphernalia of symbols inherited from G r e e c e a n d Rome. C e n t a u r s , broken columns, sphinxes are snatched out

OCCULT. 1941. Wood engraving, 2" Chariot collection.

5

of context from their neo-classical frame. They become his own personalized images. Typical is The Centaur, mutilated and its gallop reduced to the aimless rocking of a hobby horse. The healing of the wound meant, in Doi's case, turning from the West toward the East. Most explicit in its imagery is Occult. Doi's s p i r i t u a l i z a t i o n d e e p e n e d . B o r rowed symbols, be they from East or West, were replaced by personal ones. Mystics have been at a loss to put their visions into words. Doi found it hardly easier to translate his in terms of line and color. The works of that period come close to pure abstraction. His oranges and vermillions signify flames and light. A simplified Buddha shape Is Doi's hieroglyph for meditation. Faceless, seen from the back, it assumes at times the dark musty outline of a mortuary bundle. At others, it whirls and blazes with light. For Doi light equals enlightenment. The realm proper to the visual arts is, needless to say, that of the visible. There was a real danger that the artist, having crossed this borderline, would stop work. To intimates he would mention his intent not to paint any more. We should be grateful that he changed his mind. Toward the end, warmed by a sort of Indian summer, he painted some of his best paintings. Peace had been found the hard way. Doi left aside all symbols. He did not need them

any more. His search, in a circular motion that had lasted his lifetime, ended face to the hills, cliffs, and valleys of Kauai. In his youth he had used them as models in his search for form. Now he saw them as spiritual entities. Wisdom was not to be sought any more in other planets or in yoga postures. Wisdom was all around him. In the paintings of the 1960s form and spirit are, at the end of the long search, reconciled. The landscapes of the 1920s are sculpturesque, with values strongly contrasted. In the 1960s form gives way to space. The color thins. The bare canvas plays an increasingly dominant role. Curtains of clouds barely open up to disclose a narrow strip of landscape. One guesses at grassy plateaus on top of cliffs, the darkening vertical of their walls blending into the verdant slope of the valley below. A key to Doi's masterly work is that he belonged. To Hawaii of course, but Hawaii includes the skyscrapers of Waikiki, the hotels of Kaanapali. He belonged most singularly to Kauai. As we grow in size, now that we are one State among the many, a second wave of dogooders rushes our way. They are the missionaries of aesthetic. They proclaim international artistic formulas as a cure-all for ills we have not. We should be wary of the sort of hit-andrun wisdom with which they deliver their admonitions before returning home. Could we

give them in turn an advice they do not ask for, it would be to try to empty themselves of selves long enough to look at our cliffs and sea, long enough to try and unravel the intricate complexity of our Hawaiian ways. That there is here, right at home, matter enough to inspire great art is proved by Doi of Kauai. Jean Chariot

DREAMING BOAT. 1950. Oil o n c a n v a s , 3 2 " x 40". H o n o l u l u A c a d e m y of Arts.

WARMTH. 1956. Oil on c a n v a s , 53" x 60". C o l l e c t i o n of Miss W i l m a Fitts.

9

Madge Tennent

to study drawing and painting at the Académie Jullian, at which she took fifth place in a concours. After three years she left Paris and returned to South Africa, where she exhibited in various cities. She became the director of the Government School of Art at Johannesburg and drew fashions for several newspapers. In 1913 she started her own School of Arts in Cape Town and taught there until her marriage in 1915 to Hugh Cowper Tennent, a New Zealander.

Born June 22, 1889, in Dulwich, England, daughter of Arthur and Agnes Cook. At the age of five went with her parents to South Africa; at twelve attended the Cape Town School of Art; at thirteen went to Paris

With her husband she went to New Zealand where she became the head of the art school in Invercargill. Her husband then accepted a position as treasurer to the government of British Samoa; they remained in Samoa six years. Here for the first time she felt she had something to say in art. In 1923 on their way to England the Tennents and their two sons had meant to spend a few days in Honolulu, but decided to stay for good. Mr. Tennent started an accounting firm, and Mrs. Tennent worked seriously at interpreting the Hawaiian people. During this period she was introduced to Gauguin in reproductions and discovered the French impressionists. She was also influenced by van Gogh, Daumier, Renoir, Cézanne, and Seurat. Many of her pictures were

sent to continental U.S., sometimes for one-man shows. A successful one-man show at the Ferargil Gallery, New York City, led to several other exhibitions, some international, in Chicago and elsewhere, from 1930 to 1939. Her first exhibition in London was at the Wertheim Gallery, another later in Paris at the Bernheim-Jeune Galleries. She gave several shows at the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Grossman-Moody Gallery in Honolulu. She also exhibited at the Drake Hotel in Chicago and the Fine Arts Gallery, San Francisco. Her most memorable exhibit took place in 1945 at Gump's in Waikiki, where her "new" drawings in sepia wash and ink were shown. This exhibition was followed by the showing, at the Association of Honolulu Artists Annual, of a painting called Hawaiian Figure in Outline, which received three prizes. Soon thereafter she bowed out of a professional art life that had lasted almost half a century. She passed away on February 5, 1972, at the age of 82, about a year after this interview. She is represented in many galleries throughout the world; a large collection is housed at the Tennent Art Foundation Gallery in Honolulu.

WAHINE WARTIME STYLE. 1944. Oil on canvas. 84" x 45". Tennent Art Foundation Gallery.

T W O SISTERS OF O L D HAWAII. 1933. Oil o n c a n v a s , 7' x 3'6". S t a t e F o u n d a t i o n o n C u l t u r e a n d t h e Arts.

13

I was first trained in Paris at the Académie Jullian. If you are not trained you cannot suddenly learn overnight to do faces. You have to start very young, and you have got to be fully trained. This idea of drawing from the artists of the tradition is not a new one. People of my vintage of years will remember the students drawing from the sculptures in the museums, the artists painting from the masters of the past. I have followed this "after the master in drawing" for over forty years and continually find happiness in this form of aesthetic research. Renoir and, of course, Picasso and Gauguin—those are the great men in my life. But the only person who influenced my world, I think, in the end—because it is the end now —is Renoir. I love him very much. Stimulated by the pure color flourishes of van Gogh, the ice and fire of Cézanne, and the opalescent, jeweled, flower-tinted harmonies of Renoir, I found this experience of experimentation in color a joyous one. I began to shape my aesthetic way slowly in an original technique, while adhering to my beloved tradition of art. There is a real tendency on the part of all artists, by the way, toward what might be called "creative laziness," or over-satisfaction with the lyric sketch, at moments when a more profound search for form and organization is in order. In this I speak from experience, having had to keep technique in its place mentally, so that the art content

might not be s u b m e r g e d in s u r f a c e flourishes. Put succinctly, the artist, above all his technique, must possess an inner quality of wishing to share with the world the wonders he sees in it, through his own medium. In simple terms, it means that the painter, in order to become an artist, must have something to say from his heart, and the courage to say it. The start of a picture is made by tacking a c a n v a s on the wall (not on a w o o d e n stretcher, as is usual), soft side out. By using the soft side of the canvas to paint the picture on, I have a pleasant painting surface and the advantage of absorbent material into which the colors, by the oil being taken into the underlying canvas, become clear. Thus all my paintings made in this way have shown improvement and clarification of color values, through a period of ten to fifteen years of experience.

up in the night, to correct some details which had become clear after a few hours of rest and quiet. I never took up landscape painting—only figures, purely figures. I am attempting something profound and universal: in a typical Hawaiian subject I aspire to effect, through a fundamental and traditional procedure, and through a personal technique in an abstract way, the story in color of an island p e o p l e . . . in particular the Hawaiian type. The Hawaiians are really to me the most beautiful people in the world. No doubt about it. The Hawaiian is a piece of living sculpture. He has a generous line of brow, a wide-lifted eyebrow over heavily formed eyelids, a beautifully curved nostril, and thickly modeled but rhythmically classic mouth, like a "wing bent down." He is the Greek ideal, with the added beauty of dark gold skin and ebony hair.

The composition of e a c h picture w a s drawn direct, without the usual many small sketches customary in making mural paintings. I thought that by making too many pre-mural drawings I would lose a part of the precious lyricism, that even my heavy Hawaiians needed to satisfy my idea of their tremendous beauty.

I have built my Hawaiian figures in art, in the manner of building a cathedral: cathedrals are built slowly, and the people who build them seldom experience the joy of seeing their life work completed, but are sustained only by the instinctive faith that their work is important and beautiful.

When a charcoal drawing was actually begun, each figure, line, and form was balanced and counterbalanced with all the care I could muster, in relation to the organization as a whole. Sometimes, I would get

If the foregoing seems not to be an integrated whole, it is because the interview with Mrs. Tennent, held near the end of a long and varied career, has been supplemented with excerpts from her unpublished writings and her 1939 Autobiography ol an Unarmed Artist (New York, Columbia University Press).

HAWAIIAN IN VAN GOGH YELLOW. Of the 1930s. Oil on canvas, 67" x 42", detail. Chariot collection.

SKETCH. 1957. Black ink on blue paper, 26" x 20". Private collection.

Satoru Abe Edward M. Brownlee Kenneth Bushnell Jean Chariot J. Halley Cox Juliette May Fraser Hon-Chew Hee Sueko M. Kimura John I. Kjargaard Ben Norris Louis Pohl Shirley Russell Tadashi Sato Willson Stamper Edward A. Stasack Tseng Yu-ho John Young

19

Satoru Abe

Born 1926 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Attended McKinley High School and was one of Shirley Russell's students. After a few years of indecision, in 1948 decided to go to New York to pursue an artistic career. Attended the Art Students League in New York and studied under instructors Louis Bouché, Jon Carrol, and George Grosz. Married a fellow student. Returned to Hawaii in 1950. Met Isami Doi, who was to be a great influence, artistically and spiritually. In 1952 went to Japan to find a cultural identity and also to indulge in the artistic environment. Had two one-man shows in Tokyo. Returned to Hawaii after a year. In 1956 left for New York for the second time. Joined the Sculpture Center in New York and had four one-man shows there. In 1963 was a recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim grant. Returned to Hawaii in 1970 on a grant by the National Endowment for the Arts as artist-in-residence at Waianae High School. Would like to master painting, sculpturing, drawing, and printmaking. Presently resides in Makaha, Hawaii.

20

22

A M O N G THE RUINS. 1970. Bronze, 5 ' x 15'. State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.

23

We are a mystery to ourselves. I started as a painter and evolved into a sculptor. Sculpturing is mostly labor with three moments of ecstasy—the moment the idea is conceived, halfway through when I realize that it will turn out all right, and the moment of elation when it is completed. I think it is very important for an artist to complete something every so often. Every fourth day is a nice rhythm for me. I do very little introspecting. I just create things as I feel the need, whether it is just for colors, forms, or ideas. Certain themes seem to appear frequently, but good or bad, art is created with equal proficiency and enthusiasm. I weed them out later. Painting demands full attention but in sculpturing, I can listen to music or to my thoughts. In creating something in paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, and jewelry, I feel a little more complete as an artist. I would like to venture into landscaping and architecture. It seems that creating is endless, and the next piece, with its idea and image free from any handicap, is the most exciting. I do not demand an audience nor appreciation for my work, as I realized some time ago that creating art is primarily a salvation and an indulgence for me. I rarely go to exhibitions to see other people's work. I like to see good things on exhibit, but I get self-conscious when I see bad art, for it reminds me of all the bad art I have created. I make a lot of tree forms and

think of them as extensions or transformations of the human form . . . probably an influence of my Oriental birth and the philosophy of reincarnation. I am still searching for answers to the questions "Where was I?" "What is life for?" "Where will I go?" But it is of some comfort that as an artist I can leave something of value behind. Romantically speaking, I would like oneday to roam the world, living and working, leaving a work of art wherever I go.

24

26

Edward M. Brownlee

joined the army. Spent three years with the occupation forces in Japan as a topographer. Attended Oregon State University in 1949, in the forestry school. Switched to art; traveled to Europe in 1951, then transferred to the California College of Arts and Crafts where he earned a BFA degree, with honors. After a year of study with Jean Chariot and Gustav Ecke, received an MFA degree at the University of Hawaii. Has lived and worked in Hawaii since then, concentrating on architectural sculpture. Prizes received range from a special award by the Hawaii chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the W a t u m u l l Foundation, and n u m e r o u s p u r c h a s e awards and prizes from the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and other juried shows in Hawaii and on the mainland. Has traveled extensively throughout the Indo-Pacific and Orient and is an authority on the art and cultures of the Pacific rim.

Sculptor. Born April 23, 1929, in Portland, Oregon. Quit high school at the end of the third year, and

At present he maintains studios in Honolulu and in the Blue Mountain district of Oregon. He is represented by the Downtown Gallery in Honolulu and the Fountain Gallery in Portland.

27

GATEWAY. 1971. Cast stone with stainless steel, 9' x 5' x 14'. Honolulu Redevelopment Agency, River Street Mall.

29

On the west side of Portland where I grew up there were many old houses falling apart or being torn down. There were pieces of old plaster lying about—ready-made material for young artists. As kids we would take these pieces of plaster and draw great murals on the sidewalk. Three or four of us would get together, and a whole street-full of pictures would be drawn. Actually every child is interested in drawing. It's natural and, I feel, endemic to the human species. When I started out to follow a career in art everyone told me I couldn't survive. They said, "You will be a poor starving artist." The vision of the suffering that an artist must go through is a lot of romantic nonsense. The only thing an artist really suffers is the real knowledge of time, the knowledge of his own transience in this world. There never seems to be enough time for the perceptions of the work in progress to develop, to improve, to be polished; time for the inconsistencies to be removed. A work of art is a statement, an expression of the reality of a human condition. Inconsistencies in the statement, in the form, detract from the directness and meaningful content of the expression. The art department of the University of Hawaii was quite small when I came to study for my master's degree. I earned my degree, and after that my formal education was over. My real education was about to begin. I started working with people in the

construction trades. I learned from sheet metal men, from carpenters, from craftsmen who spend their lives working with their hands in a real way. These people showed me how to turn my own hands into creative tools. Of course, merely being in Hawaii has been a great influence. Very early in my career here I became interested in Oceanic art forms—not so much the anthropomorphic shapes but the wonderful, intricate curvilinear patterns. There was the influence of my two great teachers, Jean Chariot and Gustav Ecke. Each man brought to the classrooms here a tradition and fund of knowledge of his own background and experience that was rich and deep. Gustav Ecke came here after years in China and opened up a whole world of the wonderful shapes and forms of early China, as well as the rest of the Orient. Wow! It was exciting. It appealed to me in a sensuous way like some beautiful female. The forms of the bronzes and jades I learned in Ecke's classroom are still a part of my vocabulary. Jean Chariot coming from the other side of the Pacific, from Mexico, brought with him a richness and knowledge of another culture. His influence was broader in that he infused into his teaching a strong feeling of the continuity and presence of history. I feel very fortunate in having touched this man. Materials always seem to come up in any

discussion of art. The absence of the socalled proper materials seems to be an excuse for so many who cannot produce. If the artist really wants to express the presence of his being, he can pick up any material and mold it to fit his inner perception. Materials will come to the artist as he works and learns. Each creative expression will point the way to the next and to the material best suited to that expression. Hell! The mud and grass under his feet are a good place to start. The mountains are full of stones and trees and there is coral on the beach. The real problem is not a blockage from lack of materials or tools but the need for gratification, for immediate recognition, for an identity. The wrong value seems always to be important. The real value is in doing. Intrinsic within the creative act is the presence of real identification. Each molding of the day or cut with the chisel demands a choice, a judgment. It is in making this choice that real individual identification emerges. Being an "artist" or the member of a club or a race is merely identity, a cheap name tag that can be found anywhere and gathered like a souvenir. Real identification can emerge within the individual only as he makes his personal decisions of what is important to him and what will stand as an expression of the reality of his human condition. What I am doing now is following a new interest. Slowly my vocabulary is changing

31

f r o m c o m p l e t e l y abstract forms. C h a n g e started a f e w y e a r s a g o with t h e blade a n d axe f o r m s ; n o w I a m almost wholly c o n c e r n e d with birds. I h a v e b e e n w a t c h i n g birds, t h e n translating what I s e e t h r o u g h m y fingers a n d m y v o c a b u l a r y of f o r m s into p i e c e s of sculpture. I s e e the birds in t h e air a n d t h e n s e e t h e m again in m y fingers. It's like giving t h e great soaring iwa a n d t h e h a w k a s e c o n d life, but with t h e imprint of m y expression. Being c o n t e m p o r a r y is not important. T h e w h o l e idea of keeping up with history is fallacious. Visual history is a rich s o u r c e of beauty f r o m w h i c h t h e artist m a y draw. H o w e v e r , t h e artist is himself t h e carrier of all that has b e e n c r e a t e d before him. Art is t h e e x p r e s s i o n of t h e reality of a h u m a n condition. T h e artist m a y find himself at any n u m b e r of h u m a n c o n d i t i o n s during t h e c o u r s e of his productive life. E a c h c o n d i t i o n m a y s e e m unique a n d n e w to him, but he s h a r e s t h e m with t h e past.

T'SUNG. 1971. Cast stone, 1 9 ' x 8 ' x 8 ' . Honolulu Redevelopment Agency, River Street Mall.

G O L D E N EAGLE 1971 Cast bronze. 24 • 2 0 State F o u n d a t i o n on Culture a n d the Arts

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Kenneth Bushneil

Painter,

born

October

16,

1933,

in Los

Angeles,

California. Lived in and attended schools in California through

college except

for a brief

period

in

New

M e x i c o from ages 6 to 10. Son of a small-business m a n w h o e n g a g e d in activities ranging from aircraft m e c h a n i c , to manager of a gasoline station chain, to driller

of

independent

oil

wells,

to

cattle

trader.

Received formal art training from the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Hawaii. Began

painting in the Islands in 1960. B e c a m e

member 1961.

of the

University

Participated

of Hawaii art faculty

in n u m e r o u s

local and

a in

national

group and o n e - m a n exhibitions. Active in the following areas

aside

from

painting:

filmmaking,

multimedia

theater, settings for dance, sculpture (including light structure), environmental design, exposition design.

35

1969. Acrylic, ¡60" x ®8" ((®m 'the diagonal). Coi!cct:on of the ¡artist.

37

I guess I really came in through the back door, as my first interests were doing theater design in a small college. As I began getting more interested in the visual aspects of the theater, I just gravitated into the art department. In a roundabout way I became more interested in things that were going on in Europe than in this country in the beginning of this century. I shared a studio with Leslie Biller at a very formative time. Some of the notions that he acquired from Beckman and Matisse, the more expressive, figurative approaches, began to interest me, but I took it through a different kind of strainer than Les and came out with an interest in painting from natural references. Also Gordon Rice and I, at a time when we were graduate students, did a lot of landscaping in the islands. He was attracted to the nineteenthcentury European landscape tradition, and so we did a lot of plein-air painting together. I think this, combined with some of the expressionist painters after the First World War, a funny combination, began to enter into the formative stages of my painting. I was also quite interested in what Milton Resnick was doing. I think that he was really moving out of a lot of Monet's ideas and if nothing else, made me look at Monet rather than continue with Resnick. I do a lot of rather conventional drawings from the model. Mainly just taking down observations in rather a literal way. There

is some kind of inner resource that comes from taking something from nature and examining it, scrutinizing it at close hand, that I am not sure I can explain. I think I have been learning quite a bit from thrashing through the past, especially ideas of the nineteenth century. Then the analytical cubists held a very tight focus on a limited number of ideas touching on Einstein's concern with relativity. Now it seems to me that we are drawing on these more fundamental times in history where the focus was tighter, and are now incorporating them in other ways so that we have someone like Jasper Johns who in a way is heavily indebted to the cubists, and yet his concern with painting is probably quite different. But the formal ideas, I think, are not so new. Pollock becomes new in his vision, but the way that he sees is very much conditioned by the earlier ideas of Monet, the cubists and the surrealists. I think it is nice to go back and try to get the ideas at the fountainhead rather than pick them up in more fragmented ways in your immediate surroundings. If the question is whether art is really generated by previous art or whether it is necessary to make new art to extend old art, I suppose my viewpoint could be called a rather traditional one. Culturally there seems to be a preoccupation with innovation and not developing ideas, but rather moving from one possibility to another possibility prematurely. I don't think artists are

doing that as much as galleries and writers about art are doing it, even though we do have a number of people practicing art as a response to the way that art is being talked about. I am finding my own paintings now must be read in an area that I guess is somewhere between pure atmospheric space and the concrete architectural forms that confine it and give it context. Somehow, I have had this feeling that I would like to envelop the viewer or to preoccupy him with a kind of spatial ambience that comes from surfaces that don't establish themselves irrevocably in one position in space, but are capable of shifting as we move around the picture. The different references in that picture begin to keep the reading of surfaces and spaces moving. I was interested in reflected surfaces at one time because of their transitive atmospheric character. I was setting up a situation that was capable of changing as the observer changed his position. Sections of the paintings would seem to u n h i n g e and change from one position to another. Although this is not a new idea, it is one that has been of particular interest to me for a long time. I borrowed it from the gilded paintings of the Italian proto-Renaissance painters—the idea that reflected surfaces have certain atmospheric properties that, combined with other ingredients, give one a very rich and exciting sense of spatial mobility. I think my art is a fairly impure art

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QUEEN SURF QUEEN. 1968. Oil, 88" x 88" (on the diagonal). Collection of the artist.

39

in that respect. The reflective properties of gilded metallic areas create an illusion of either deep or shallow space, depending on the angle of light striking the surface and the position of the observer. The movement from a more saturated palette into more pastel colors started with some of the later paintings with metallic surfaces. I found that the mid-range tones in more diluted hues work against the metallic surface in marvelous ways, creating the greatest apparent change in space as well as in the tone and temperature. The surface would seem continuous, or if I used highly saturated colors, the spatial quality of the color itself would tend to be more muscular than the tonal relationship of the color to the silver; so I started reducing the intensity of my palette. I became interested in the kind of richness that came out of closer tones. Keeping a tone absolutely taut in its dark-light relationships often proved to be much richer than moving from a purely identifiable point on the spectrum to another purely identifiable point. The color has to do with this notion about atmosphere and the transitive quality of space and something being hard and atmospheric at the same time, depending upon which edge of the shape you read. Italy, I think, caused a little bit of change in my palette too. There are atmospheric impurities lending a certain richness because of the particular nature of that atmosphere, which incidentally is not entirely pollution.

It has been there hundreds of years and begins to mediate the colors a bit. The extremes begin to pull together, and the color fabric of an area tends to be more tightly knit than you would get in Hawaii where greens a mile away seem to fall right down on you. In some ways it is easier to imagine Leonardo coming up with notions of recessional space by moving to the middle tone in the distance in Italy than it is in Hawaii where you get very dark darks, or light lights, in what is comparatively deep space which tends to flatten the landscape. Living in Hawaii? Well, I think any place that one works in must must have some impression on him and filter into the way he sees and interprets what he sees, even if the references aren't directly natural references. There are also just the things that are around—the Aala district was predominantly Filipino when I was there, but many Japanese and Chinese cultural remnants were left. There were certain shapes and forms that filtered into the studio that appear in the early Aala paintings, and I am still finding those forms cropping up over and over again, so that it is inevitable that the character of the area that you live in is going to be influential. My interest in different kinds of subject matter seems to involve fundamental forms, that is, the subject matter becomes fused. A hip, for instance, and the shoulder of an onion are not so terribly different, and sometimes this swelling or volume has the same

attraction—visual attraction—and I find it fairly easy, responding to it visually, to shift back and forth between subjects in nature. So it is not just human beings or other organic forms or industrial forms, but it is somehow the relationships of these forms, each to each, that are of interest to me.

PEAR. 1971. Acrylic, 30"x18". Collection of the artist.

42

Jean Chariot

of the style and content of the M e x i c a n mural renaissance. C o m p l e t e d the first f r e s c o in M e x i c o since the Colonial period. His discovery of Manilla and Posada as fine-arts artists, and writings on Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco, and others helped develop an ethnic cultural c o n s c i o u s n e s s a n d explain it to the world. W o r k e d as a n archaeologist in C h i c h e n Itza for the Carnegie

Institution

(1926-1929)

and

moved

to

Washington, D.C., to supervise the printing of his section of the official report. There, began a long friendship and collaboration with Paul Claudel. M o v e d to N e w York w h e r e he helped l a u n c h his M e x i c a n colleagues, collected M e x i c a n prints for the Metropolitan Museum, lectured, and wrote. Worked at various times at Smith, Columbia, Yale, t h e University of G e o r g i a at Athens, Black Mountain College, and the Fine Art Center, Colorado Springs. B e g a n a long collaboration with t h e printer Lynton R. Kistler.

Com-

pleted several murals in w h i c h he created a distinctive Painter—including m u r a l s — g r a p h i c artist, author, lecturer. Born 1898 in Paris of a French-Russian father

view of the United States. On a G u g g e n h e i m

s c h o l a r s h i p in M e x i c o

City

with

(1945-1947), researched a book on the first years

strong family ties in Mexico. S h o w e d a p r e c o c i o u s in-

of the M e x i c a n mural renaissance. M o v e d to Hawaii

terest in art, w h i c h w a s e n c o u r a g e d by his parents.

in 1949, w h e r e he taught at the University, did a

and a F r e n c h - S p a n i s h - S e p h a r d i c - A z t e c

mother

G r a d u a t e d from private tutors to the coulisses of the

number

Beaux-Arts

jects,

and the liturgical art m o v e m e n t

of the

French-Catholic renaissance. Specialized in w o o d bas-

of murals on Hawaiian and religious

learned

Hawaiian,

and

wrote

plays

in

subthat

language. In Fiji in 1962 painted a f r e s c o w h i c h in-

reliefs, textile designs for vestments, and prints. De-

spired many new subjects. Has rediscovered his in-

signed his first f r e s c o mural in 1919, after the ex-

terest in sculpture and is experimenting in new media

perience of World War I. Wrote poetry.

s u c h as pottery, painted tiles, and enamels.

Left for M e x i c o in 1921. B e c a m e a friend of local M e x i c a n artists and w a s a key figure in the evolution

Married

Zohmah

four children.

Day

in 1939. T h e

couple

has

43

KAHUNA WITH GOD-STONE. 1972. Oil, 60" x 40". State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.

45

The question of Mexico and me has been misrepresented somewhat. Critics date the beginning of my Mexican period as of 1920. Actually, I arrived in Mexico, I could say, the day I was born. For four generations—150 y e a r s — m y people have lived in Mexico. My grandfather Goupil was born there and married a Mexican. Besides that I had since childhood a great awareness of Mexican archaeology. My great-uncle Eugène Goupil was a.great collector. I grew up surrounded by many objects of pre-Hispanic art. I took their beauty for granted. I myself have Mexican blood, the correct mixture of Spanish and Indian. My great grandmother was of undiluted Aztec stock. At times I felt a terrible pull toward things that were not what a good Frenchman would naturally enjoy. I leaned toward forms of art labeled by some as primitive or savage. So, when I went to Mexico it was really a return rather than an arrival. I found there the things I had been looking for. It was extraordinary to see the people as I had imagined them come alive in the streets of Mexico City and even more so in Indian villages. The religion of the ancient Aztecs included human sacrifices. Of course, nowadays even though Christianity came to the fore there remains a certain relationship to life and the value of life which is different from that I had known in France. When I landed in Mexico the military revolution had somewhat abated, but it still was smoldering. Many still died violent deaths. One of my dearest

friends was shot while he made ready'to shoot the other guy. Such happenings clinched, I would say, my love of Mexico, tying, as they did, the Mexico of today with what I knew of ancient Mexico. In Yucatán I found and copied representations of human sacrifices among the Mayans. The victim was bent backwards over a round stone so that the ribs got further away from the heart. The heart that the pagan priest held high as an oblation should be still throbbing. The god would have scorned the gift of a dead heart. I just give this as an illustration of the fact that, Frenchman though I am, I am also a Mexican Indian. I held a unique position among the group of perhaps half a dozen artists who started what is now known as the Mexican Renaissance, being, as I was, both a practicing muralist and, since my early teens, an archaelogist. In the mid-twenties I joined an expedition to Chichén Itzá under the guidance of Dr. Sylvanus G. Morley. As we unearthed sculptures and f r e s c o e s I could check, so to speak, our brand of Mexican art with what the Mayan Indians had accomplished four or five hundred years before. When I returned to Mexico City I would bolster my friends' hopes by telling them tales of ancient Yucatán and assuring them that they were—that we w e r e — o n the right track. In those days there were mighty few people interested in what men like Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros, were doing. In fact, the conservative majority of cultured Mexicans

would have liked nothing better than to whitewash our murals. In France, one of my interests had been popular art. In my teens, I already owned a collection of Images d'Epinal, pennysheets sold in the streets. These were mid-nineteenth-century woodblocks printed in black and colored by hand or stenciled in rather a rough way and deemed to be the work of artisans rather than that of fine-arts artists. In Mexico in those days, most of the politicians were revolutionaries, more or less reformed. They were a rough lot. The secretary of education, José Vasconcelos, though interested in art, could not properly ask them to sponsor art programs. The frescoes of the Ministry of Public Education were listed in the budget as a repainting of the walls of the building which was, of course, absolutely correct. However, as a result, Vasconcelos could not afford to pay us more than was paid to masons and housepainters, which were the titles under which the muralists were listed. The expedition to Chichén Itzá was sponsored by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Originally I was hired to copy the Mayan bas-reliefs. But soon it was found that I was literate in a way, and that I already had an acquaintance with things preHispanic. Eventually, when the time came to publish our final report, I was given the task of writing about the bas-reliefs and sculptures we had unearthed. I went to Washington to correct the galley proofs of

HAWAIIAN DRUMMER. 1971. A c r y l i c o n paper, 2 4 " * 18' C o l l e c t i o n of Mr. a n d Mrs. Robert S. Ichida.

47

the two volumes of the report and supervise the printing of its illustrations. And that is how I came to the United States. On arrival I found that the fame of the Mexican muralists was seeping into New York. There they were more appreciated than in Mexico. I was asked to teach at the Art Students League of New York. I lectured in many places. I gave the famed annual Ryerson lectures at Yale, and so on. One of my last stops among colleges and universities of the mainland was in Colorado Springs, where I was head of the art school. One day, Ben Norris came in, and he was a charming guy. He was looking for somebody he could induce to come and teach art in Hawaii. Now, just before his visit, I had received a letter from the Haitian Government inviting me to go there and start a renaissance. Why they did it, I know not. But Hawaii and Haiti sounded to me just about the same. I held a canny idea that perhaps I could go to Hawaii with Ben Norris, who described it, of course, as a place of palm trees, sunlight, and so forth. Then I could go to Haiti on the weekends and help them launch their renaissance. But when I looked at the map I found that it was quite impossible to do so. I had to choose the one or the other, and, for no other reason except that Ben was a nice guy, I chose Hawaii. Hawaii is so far away from everything else that here I am still, some twenty-five years later.

48

INSPIRATION—STUDY—CREATION. 1967. Mural painting, 15" x 16'6". East-West Center, Honolulu.

50

J. Halley Cox

Born in Des Moines, Iowa, 1910. BA degree in art education, San Jose State College 1934; MFA degree, University of California, Berkeley 1937; art teaching,

California public schools 1938-1946; assistant professor, California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland 1946-1948; professor of art, University of Hawaii 1948-1973; chairman, Department of Art, University of Hawaii 1963-1964. One-man shows San Francisco area 1939-1951; Gump's, San Francisco 19471949, 1951. One-man show Honolulu Academy of Arts 1950; first awards, watercolor and drawing, Honolulu Academy of Arts 1951, 1952, 1955. Oneman show Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1956; exhibit designer and consultant, Bernice P. Bishop Museum 1958-1962. One-man shows Contemporary Arts Center 1962; Gima's Gallery 1966, 1970; charter member, Hawaii Painters and Sculptors League; participant in Hawaiian archaeology projects with the Bishop Museum 1951 to present; instructor, arts of the Pacific, South Pacific summer study cruises 1964, 1965, 1969; coauthor Hawaiian Petroglyphs with Edward Stasack 1969; Hawaiian Sculpture, with William H. Davenport 1974. Paintings in collections of Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, Hawaii State Department of Education, Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Contemporary Arts Center of Hawaii, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and many private collections.

51

FIELDS 3. 1971. Mixed media (watercolor, toned paper, acrylic varnish, brass rod), 20" * 20". Collection of the artist.

53

In 1948 I came to the University of Hawaii. Before that I was at California College of Arts and Crafts, teaching painting, drawing, and composition; I also started the art education program there. My teachers in California included John Haley and also Earl Loran, who wrote Cezanne's Composition. But style, method, concepts, what a painting is, came to me mostly I think from looking at the works of Paul Klee, Feininger, John Marin, then Turner, Cézanne, and so forth. But particularly Paul Klee. I worked almost entirely in watercolor, the traditional transparent wash type. Oh, I had tried a few ideas and experimentation. One of them, for instance, was folding the watercolor sheet after the composition was laid on, with a pre-arranged scheme of folds so that level shifts occurred along the surface. A sort of a relief in which the composition would fit in with the structure, usually landscape or an abstraction of a landscape drawing. I called them "flextures." I have been interested in the analysis of structure of the conditions in nature, say, or not necessarily in just nature, but just structural conditions—period. Of course, a good pile of them are landscapes, architecture, boats; this was mostly, I think, trying to find a symbol which gave the essence of the structural conditions—the way, for instance, the rigging on the boat was put together. The stretched lines are flexible but when they are

tight they are rigid and stable, and the weights and thicknesses that change due to the engineering necessity and the connections, tie points. I tried to get my sense of that condition in the patterns that occurred. This was particularly in drawing, of course, but most of it was also a basis for painting. I tend to highly simplify and abstract from certain impressions of light and color in nature, so that only one, or just a few, intermingling effects occur rather than a lot of them. So, in that sense it is more structural than an impressionist work might be. I think now at least that color and linear structure are equally emphasized. Of course lately, on the modular scheme, color b e c o m e s really almost the entire content of my paintings. Actually, I don't think I give the same kind of thought or attention to the color aspect that I do to the linear material. Color tends to be more expressive and less analytical. I don't think that, for me, color works as structure independently of the structure of the linear conditions or area conditions. If it is structure in a way, at least it is not intellectual. In my paintings I tend to favor a progressive simplification of b o t h s u b j e c t a n d means, an elimination of images as descriptions and the acceptance of the value of the simplest, elemental, even primitive, graphic mark in which precision is only suggested— a calculated casualness. However, I see no value in accident or c h a n c e as a method. Their products have no meaning except as

they may be contained within the content of a purposeful structure. Paint or material a l o n e is not content, and p u r e action in painting communicates little. Only by control can the artist form structured symbols— by being in close contact with the work and not a distant spectator or a haphazard selector of mindless extra-human happenings. I see light as energy, but colorless, if that is possible, and sometimes, as in the sun drawings, I make an attempt to suggest the formlessness of the condition—its possible expansion or contraction in those areas. Of course, this is only one kind of light, a kind of central source, and not so much color or even structure. I began this abstraction, before coming to Hawaii, in the use of a sharply delineated architectural approach even in trees, mountains, and so forth. When I arrived here, it seemed to me that this country was built more or less the way I was already drawing and painting. One of the shortcomings of watercolor is to some extent a limitation in size. I wanted to do something a little bigger, so I worked out these composites where I could put nine or twelve small pieces together, and which could be done under control—making the total a single composition made from a series of independent ones. Chariot gave it the name polyptich, which is of course exactly what they are. Then I began to work on colored paper as a toning device, and the papers kept getting darker and darker and

H Ilk if* | gy. a

i

. 11

M"

• I

S U N CIRCLE. 1969. Mixed media, 30" * 30". Collection of Dean McNeal.

V^ffi**

~ ^H

j

ISpffiM

lly'lliilllP

«

55

deeper in tone. These, of course, are mostly small abstractions and some sun paintings. This, then, has actually led into this modular treatment of combined squares, depending mostly on color as the force of the object, and structure somewhat secondary. O n e thing that I guess accounts for it is that I have a feeling that a painting to be effective and under control, at least for me, shouldn't be too big. Something that is right there and under immediate contact. In other words, it doesn't have to be a great big structure to get at the essence of the form or the conditions of the form and the tensions, of the activities they might have. All this keeps narrowing me back to the small size all the time. In the modular paintings the structure develops in two or three ways. First, these are not just offhand; they are thought out, most of them, rather completely as to, let's say, a system. I don't design whole paintings, incidentally; I design a system in which I can hold the content of single units reasonably c l e a r a n d uncomplicated, but with enough possible variations so that these may be u s e d in a n u m b e r of positions. So the structure is internal with each one, in the sense of its own completeness and in establishing the pattern of the scheme. Then putting these together is- reatly where a good amount of the creative process occurs, I am sure—if that is what it is. And I sort of strictly stay away from adjusting the units afterwards, after the composition is completed.

Not that it couldn't be done, and it would be perfectly reasonable to do it. But I want to halt the kind of systematic built-in necessities. In a way, there is a lot of c h a n c e involved here. There are some things that can't happen. Does that explain where structure is? So there are three areas: designing the system, then the way each section is developed as an individual piece, and finally, the total composition. Of course, the regularity is basic to the structural idea. In Diagonal Square, which was one of the very first really successful modular developments, I wanted to use this seemingly twodimensional pattern, which is nothing more than a diagonal cross on a square to extend the square into a sense of openness, back into space or forward. The diagonals w h i c h were sometimes not completed but tied in very precisely, say at the centers or the corners extending into space, tend to m a k e it seem as though this thing goes back and forth into this simple surface. In many others I have worked out an interlocking pattern or a pattern of two-dimensional relationships meandering across the painting or forming independent units. In some of them, one area tends to b e c o m e transparent to the next one w h e n a color structure continues into the next square forming an overstructure. By this m e a n s two systems exist: the system of modular squares, and a system of transparent overstructures which are sometimes two dimensional and sometimes illusions of depth. I attempt to make the over-

structure system more forceful than the system of modular units, to dominate enough to override the modular squares—destroying the system in order to make it work. I have no specific way of knowing why things are effective, or how consistency and unity and all happen properly. This is connected with intuitive judgment, and that, I think, is really what guides the whole operation in spite of any kind of system you've got. Structured by intuition! One of the first things I c a n remember as a child is making drawings, and also being rather surprised that other people weren't doing this or couldn't do it. This worried me. Just a little bit. Not very long or very much, but I remember being worried.

25 DRAWINGS. 1971. Ink, 20" x 20". State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.

58

Juliette May Fraser

ian Legends: made pen drawings of mission homes, now in collection of Mission Children's Society. Illustrations of Hawaiian legends published in Paris in 1932. First mural commission (1935) for Mrs. Charles Adams, as a gift for the young Ben Dillingham. Murals for Library of Hawaii (1934), and for Hawaii Pavilion at San Francisco World's Fair (1939). Wrote and illustrated Ke Anuenue, published by University of Hawaii Press in 1952, and chosen by American Institute of Graphic Arts as one of that year's fifty best books.

Painter, muralist, printmaker, illustrator. Born January 27, 1887 in Honolulu. Father an accountant, mother a teacher (the first principal of Ka'iulani School). A Punahou School graduate, majoring in art; BA Wellesley College, 1912-1915. Art Students League of New York and summer school at Woodstock, N.Y. Studied painting in Honolulu with Frederick Taubes and Joseph Albers, and etching with Hue M. Luquiens. Illustrated two volumes of Hawai-

Exhibited in de Young Memorial Museum, San Francisco, San Joaquin Pioneer Museum, and Haggin Art Gallery, Stockton, California. One-man show at Honolulu Academy of Arts. First president of Hawaii Painters and Sculptors League and of Honolulu Printmakers. Mural commission for Board of Water Supply (1954), mosaic decoration for Mid-Pacific Institute (1959), study trip to Italy and Greece (1959). On the island of Chios, with David Asherman, decorated the interior of a Greek Orthodox chapel with fresco murals. The villagers named the street leading to the chapel May Fraser Street. Mural commissions in Honolulu: American Savings and Loan Association, Kapiolani Branch (1969); Ala Moana Hotel assembly room (1970); Mr. and Mrs. Charles K.C. Chang's penthouse apartment (1972); Benjamin Parker Elementary School, Kaneohe, mural commissioned by the State Foundation on Culture and the Arts (1972). This tile glaze-painting was executed in Puebla, Mexico, with the assistance of Mexican craftsmen.

59

KANA WRESTLING THE TURTLE. 1954. Fresco on Canec, 42" x 34". Collection of the artist.

61

I was born in Honolulu during the latter part of Kalakaua's reign. I don't remember Kalakaua because I was a little bit too young for it. But I do remember his sister Liliuokalani after she was deposed. I think I have probably always been interested in drawing. I used to d r a w . . . well, more like the Hawaiian petroglyphs—stick people. From then on it was so natural. I kept on drawing, that's all. The color came later. I took any art that was given at Punahou, but that was rather brief, and I really had to get ready to go to college. I was going to Wellesley. The courses in art there were disappointing. The best course I had was by a young woman who was also a professional architect. She wouldn't allow us to use just descriptive terms. She made us use architectural terms. So in a way I got to know the architectural language, and that came in handy afterward because mural painting is an architectural technique. And I got to doing frescoes and other kinds of murals. The very first mural I did was an outside mural for Mrs. Charles Adams at the Peninsula. She wanted the entire house painted on the outside. It was a play place for her grandson, Ben Dillingham. Mrs. A d a m s wanted trees all around. I did paint banyan roots over the front door—that made a good entrance. But on the sea side I couldn't see trees because it seemed to me that I was planting them underwater. It didn't seem reasonable, so I painted a canoe race on that

side. There was a model of the Dillingham ship in Walter Dillingham's office, so I drew that on one side of the boathouse. There was this sort-of barracks room on the second floor that had different lockers that she called the locker room, that had to be decorated. Well, I said, how about Davy Jones' Locker. She thought that was a good idea. And so on the toilet room I put Neptune on the throne—pink coral throne surrounded by mermaids. It was undersea for the whole thing, of course, but each locker door had a separate emblem that each boy would recognize as his. After that was finished Mrs. Adams thought, well, how about painting something on the garage, and on the station wagon too. So I put a snail on the back of the station wagon which was an insult to the people who couldn't keep up. Finally, I had to design the gateway to the yard, and that was three waves cut out of sheet iron. The house was built of rough board on the outside and posed some problems, for it wore out some brushes, so it was more linear than anything else. It was mostly, as I remember, dark brown paint which would show up against the gray. Being a mural painter I am rather inclined to use uprights and horizontals and not so much curves. A curve is all right, but you have to have some kind of support, and I prefer to do a functioning mural, one that works with the architecture, like that at the Board of Water Supply. So most of the things I have done have an architectural feeling and

that, a bit, carries over into the oils. For instance, Saint Francis—definitely an upright, a pillar. I have always admired Saint Francis. In fact every place that I found that he went, I tried to go, and I went to his place of retreat. It was very secluded. The little chapel that he built and the monastery are on the brink of quite a deep valley. And there is a wooden cross that stands on the edge of it. I wandered up from the village of La Verna, up through this sort-of long meadow, and there were clumps of violets almost in the shape of footprints. So I felt as though I were following the footprints of Saint Francis, and they ended in the woods. It was a wonderful experience. Well, I don't know, it's not primarily religion. If the subject appeals to me and if I have the right size canvas, I do the subject. I also like the Trojan War. That to me is very contemporary. The story began as a heroic poem, but it got less and less heroic and ended by being a satire on war. The Trojan War started with, of all stupid things, a beauty contest! And the judge was a young man-about-town who was as piffling as any person could be. And the result of the contest, of course, was the Trojan War. I am interested in having more than one meaning to a picture. I think that it is perfectly all right to be objective or to be nonobjective; it depends on what you have to say. If you are nonobjective, your symbolism is likely to be and your meaning is likely to be

62

EYES. 1970. Linoleum cut, 12" x 19". Honolulu Academv of Arts.

63

more private, and no matter what somebody gets out of it, it is perfectly all right. If you are rather realistic, well, then you convey something nearer to what you have in your own mind, but it is always different. I am sometimes surprised at what people get out of something that I have done. I can see how they got that idea, but it wasn't in my mind to start with, and that is perfectly all right. The realistic people are closer to the prehistoric men who painted in the caves, and the nonobjective are much more like the Muslims. It is not new. Why make such a fuss about it? It is just a cycle. Some people say storytelling is wrong. I don't think so. The Egyptians haven't lost any face by telling stories, nor has Piero della Francesca. It is quality that counts, you know, not the subject and what have you.

65

HOOKAPU—FESTIVAL. 1939. Charcoal drawing and sanguine mural, 8' * 4 5 ' , detail. Honolulu Academy of Arts.

66

Hon-Chew Hee

the Friends of the Tennent Gallery. Lecturer in the College of Continuing Education, University of Hawaii, and director of the Tennent Art Foundation Gallery. Ai present he is listed in Who's Who in the West, the Dictionary of International Biography, and Asian Who? in America. He has had twenty-two one-man shows in China, New York, Honolulu, Paris, Michigan, Palo Alto, San Francisco, Oakland, and Taiwan. His work has been exhibited by the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, de Young Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Society of American Etchers, National Academy of Design, American Watercolor Society, Albany Institute of History and Art, Boston Printmakers, Honolulu Printmakers, Library of Congress, Salon de l'art libre in Paris, Northwest Printmakers, El Paso Museum of Art, and the Chinese Contemporary Artists' Guild in Hong Kong. He received the Virgil Williams scholarship, and many first prizes in drawing, serigraphy, and wood engraving in Honolulu, and did two gift prints for the Hawaii Watercolor and Serigraph Society. Painter, w a t e r c o l o r i s t , graphic artist, and muralist. Born on Maui, Hawaii, January 24, 1906, son of a Hawaiian-Chinese educator. Received his early education in China and Hawaii. Graduate of the California School of Fine Arts; studied at the Art Students League, at Columbia University in New York with André Lhote, and with Fernand Léger in Paris. He is a founder of the Hawaii Watercolor and Serigraph Society, of the Ten Bamboo Studio of Hawaii, and of

His works are in the collections of the Contemporary Arts Center of Hawaii, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Tennent Art Foundation Gallery, Taiwan National Museum, Hawaii State Capitol, and Pacific Club of Hawaii. His murals may be seen at Oakland (California) Naval Supply Center, Pearl Harbor, Maui Medical Center, Hawaiian Holiday Apartments, Waikiki Holiday Inn, Community Church of Honolulu, and Ala Moana Hotel.

Y I N - Y A N G ER. 1971. Oil, 38" x 48". Collection of the artist.

69

Even as a child I was fond of drawing. To tell the truth I was rejected in high school because I was making drawings in English class. So I quit high school and went to California School of Fine Arts. I graduated with honors and received a scholarship. I came across Diego Rivera, who did a mural in the California School of Fine Arts, and he wanted me to go with him to Mexico. I didn't go, I regret. Then in 1949 I went to Europe and studied with André Lhote and Fernand Léger. And from there I found my way. At that time Lhote was already eighty years old. His work was of course derived from cubism, and he was the great teacher. Because of that, his work was tight, held back. He also wrote books on art. Once when he saw my work, he said, 'Are you studying with Léger?" I said yes. He said, "He's a good man; I don't know if you can learn anything from him." And then Léger questioned me the same way. 'Are you studying with Lhote?" I said yes. He said, "I don't think he can teach you anything." Of the two, Léger was the greater artist but not the greater teacher. Earlier, I was trained in traditional art by Chinese teachers in China. I always wondered how I would be able to combine the East and the West. And I never could do it. Then when I dropped Chinese art altogether, went to Western art, I found Western art lacked culture. So when I studied with Lhote and Léger I was interested only in their theo-

ries, their principles, their ideas. When I returned from Europe I found out that I had to go back to the Oriental thinking. I began to use the Oriental as a base and used Occidental as the surface, working on it. And now I feel that I know what I am doing. Today I try to go into the combination of the East and the West. I had written many years ago: "I believe fine art is not a profession, it is a record of lifelong sacrifice, for the true artist has courage to live a little of the motto and to forget his body's needs. He thinks only of pouring all his thoughts into creation and hopes to find comfort in spiritual things. The virtue of the artist of today is to challenge the best instincts within him. He should be thoughtful and imaginative, sensitive to the poetry and drama of life, and he sees beauty beyond physical form. To him nature is not a conglomeration of animal life or inanimate matter. He considers nature to be another being. The vision which he transfers to the canvas is the crystalization of his inward meditation. This crystalization combines the six canons and the configurations of the East with the structure and the order of the West." These islands, the colors of the land, of the sky, the people you associate with and the conditions of your life all have something to do with your art. Look at that mountain this morning. It wouldn't be the same tonight. We look at it with different feelings, and we paint it differently.

We are flexible human beings. I paint impressionistic watercolors, abstract oils, and when I move toward serigraphy, I work in a cubistic way. Sometimes I move toward an Oriental direction. I like Picasso. Picasso is a thinker. Today we are more into art-thinking processes and not so much in the direction of technique. I teach my students to think and I grade them by their thinking. I believe Cézanne is the greatest of those in the early impressionist movement turning into abstraction. Many Chinese artists moved in that direction too. They did not copy, they did a lot of great

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GOLDEN DAYS. 1969. Serigraph, 14" x 19".

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thinking. For instance, the great ones have known that background is not one thing and foreground another, but that these are completely interdependent. My recent direction is using Yin-Yang, the oppositions: Heaven-Earth, M a n - W o m a n , Black-White, and so forth. Everything is opposition. To me art is opposition. Music is opposition. Without two colors there would be no colors. Without opposition then there is no drama, no poetry. Even this painting that you are looking at is opposites. That wheel is round and inside of it is a s q u a r e contrasts deliberately using the Yin-Yang theory.

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