|
 |
 |
|
|
         |
 |
|
 |
|
|
But when was the last time a friend described you as a swirl of multi-hued blue plunging into a fountain of bright orange? Or a universe of ripe red tomatoes floating around in your own space? That is what artist Sanae Takahata has achieved in Intimate Reflections 1991-1995: The Birth of a Self-Portrait, an arresting display of 17 large oil paintings showing at Sagacho Exhibit Space in Tokyo until the end of this month. Takahata has learned a lot about herself through the process of creating her works. The artist's paintings capture the essence of each of her subjects at a particular time in their lives within the last four years. Some of the associations - one portrait includes family members - stem from the artist's childhood in Gunma Prefecture. Others are of friends made in far-away cities. On the basis of these friendship bonds, Takahata gradually developed what became a bulging scrap book full of memorabilia on these meaningful people in her life. In getting to know them better, she discovered important symbols in their lives, including other people, which she incorporated with different combinations of color to depict their dominant emotions. These she then melded into an inner portrait of each. |
The result is a gallery of portraiture that drew this reviewer into certain of Takahata's works and repelled him from others. Each is so individualized that this makes sense. After all, we claim certain people as our friends for reasons having to do with affinities we perceive to have with them and tend to ignore others. The artist's use of color and personal artifacts in the portraits was so disarming that I quickly felt after viewing each that I had suddenly been given a big dose of personal insight into the lives of each subject, even though I've never met any of them in my life. This is no small trick to accomplish artisticallyCbut Takahata used her own method to make the idea work. She first created smaller works to translate her emotional sense of the subject into color, and then derived colorful abstract forms which she painted on and around the hyper - realistic rendering of each portrait in the large oils. On a chair under each portrait at the exhibition one of these smaller palnt1ngs filled with swirls of colors rested. The artist lost her self through her absorption in painting the portraits and by following the principle: "To know yourself is to forget yourself." "I have a plece of you, you have a piece of me," is the guiding idea behind her art. Takahata started the four-year project by interviewing friends in Seattle, New York, Paris, Cuba and Japan. In the course of these meetings, she made a point of asking each two questions : "What makes you smile? " and "What keeps you going? " @ Answers to these questions and others, along with the gifts in tbe scrap book, inspired the artist to keep working on the project, even through her own periods of self doubt. After distilling these feelings onto her canvases, Takahata titled each with a single trait that personifies an important aspect of each friend. |
And although the subjects in the paintings. are quite personal to her, the feelings they evoke are universal. The titles of the works provide a hook for the viewer to hang his hat on before settling in to muse on the details of each portrait. Thus in Independence (upper left), we get the idea that the person in Birkenstocks standing in the portrait gazing evenly back at us obviously thinks for herself. The simply dressed woman has a lightness of spirit made plain by the blue sky and white clouds transparently streaming through her smock to the horizon of some dry, sunnyland. The woman's temperament is reflected, but What about those other details : the rolling pin and dough, the pen and paper, and that lanky guy mysteriously standing in the background? It turns out the woman is a former writer for the Asahi newspaper and that the man, her husband, works for the U. S. State Department. Takahata caught up with the friends in Cuba, which inspired the background for the portrait. The artist's sister and then 4-year-old niece appear in Mischief (center) . Her use of some art by the child in the portrait increases the sense of fun conveyed by the abundance of toys and their warm smiles. Womanhood (lower right) mourns the loss of youth of the subject, a friend in her 50s bound by the traditional Japanese "ie" family system who must cook, clean and care for her father-in-1aw because she married the first son of the old man's family. The ripe tomatoes, reclined pose and darker colors convey a somberness about this time in the woman's life. Not all of the subjects agree with the artist's vision of them. That's only human. The works succeed in making us wonder about them and ourselves. |
||||
