Paul Horiuchi - Master of Collage

 

Dormant Blue by Paul Horiuchi, Casin rice paper collage on canvas, 1981 

 

As abstract expressionism was storming New York City, modern painters in the Pacific Northwest gained a reputation as "Northwest Mystics."  The term, coined by Life Magazine, described a subdued palette, a sensitivity to the natural environment and the Asian influence on modern painting in the Pacific Northwest. Asian art and artists had a profound influence on the mid-century Northwest aesthetic. Mark Tobey, the learned elder of the Northwest painters developed "white writing" after traveling in China and Japan saying, "The Orient has been the greatest influence of my life." When Tobey became interested in Sumi Painting he was given a large sumi brush and sumi ink by his friend Paul Horiuchi. Seattle artist Paul Horiuchi learned sumi painting as a youth in Japan  winning a national prize for his work when he was just 13 years old.

 

 Paul Horiuchi, 1930

courtesy Paul M. Horiochi: Washington State History Link

Following his father and brother Horiochi left Japan for the United States in 1920 where he worked for the Union Pacific Railroad in Wyoming. His fathers death and the great depression followed by deep prejudice toward the Japanese during WWII made life in America challenging for Horiuchi but then in 1944 he moved his young family to Seattle. At first he ran a business, Horiuchi's Body and Fender Shop but he never ceased painting eventually winning prizes and showing in the Seattle Art Museum.

  Color Floating in Time by Paul Horiuchi

When Horiuchi married he also converted to Catholicism, his wife's religion, and changed his name from Chikamasa to Paul taking the name Paul in honor of Paul Cezanne and Pablo Picasso. It was Picasso and Georges Braque, who through their cubist experiments with collage inspired Horiuchi to reflect on the Japanese art of collage going back to the 12th century when poets and calligraphers arranged torn paper into landscapes. One of Horiuchi's first great collages was inspired by seeing rain blown shredded layers of notices on a wall in Seattle's Chinatown. After a career that produced over 2,000 paintings in 1999 Paul Horiuchi died. Printed on the program for his memorial service were the words, "I have always wanted to create something serene, the peace and serenity, the quality needed to balance the sensationalism in our surroundings today. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I'm seeking beauty and truth in nature. This philosophy of mine hasn't changed for the last 50 years."

In The Northwest Tradition

Tom Robbins described the Northwest artistic sensibility in his novel Another Roadside Attraction linking the Northwest Coastal tribal arts, the Northwest Mystics, as well as the generation of artists and writers including Robbins himself to the atmospheric landscape of the Pacific Northwest. The current show at the Museum of Northwest Art in LaConner, Artists, Poets, Scholars: Fishtown And The Skagit River, is a tribute to those poets and artists of Robbins generation who occupied abandoned fishing shacks of the Skagit River Delta in the 1960s. The show runs through October 3, 2010.

Fishtown by David King, photograph, 1979
On Exhibit at the Museum of Northwest Art

Tom Robbins on the Northwest Artistic  Sensibility

Quoted from his novel Another Roadside Attraction 1971

"It is a landscape in a minor key. A sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tend to melt together in a silver-green blur. Great Islands of craggy rock arch abruptly up out of the flats, and at the sunrise and moonrise these outcroppings are frequently tangled in mist. Eagles nest on the island crowns and blue herons flap through the veils from slough to slough. It is a poetic setting, one which suggests inner meanings and invisible connections. The effect is distinctly Chinese. A visitor experiences the feeling that he has been pulled into a Sung dynasty painting, perhaps before the intense wisps of mineral pigment have dried upon the silk. From almost any vantage point, there are expanses of monochrome worthy of the brushes of Mi Fei or Kuo Hsi.

The Skagit Valley, in fact, inspired a school of neo-Chinese painters. In the Forties, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and their gray-on-gray disciples turned their backs on cubist composition and European color and using the shapes and shades of this misty terrain as a springboard, began to paint the visions of the inner eye. A school of sodden, contemplative poets emerged here, too. Even the original inhabitants were an introspective breed. Unlike the plains Indians, who enjoyed mobility and open spaces and sunny skies, the Northwest coastal tribes were caught between the dark waters to the west, the heavily forested foothills and towering Cascade peaks to the east; forced by the lavish rains to spend weeks on end confined to their longhouses. Consequently, they turned inward, evolving religious and mythological patterns that are startling in their complexity and intensity, developing an artistic idiom that for aesthetic weight and psychological depth was unequaled among all primitive races. Even today, after the intrusion of neon signs and supermarkets and aircraft industries and sports cars, a hushed but heavy force hangs in the Northwest air: it defies flamboyance, deflates extroversion and muffles the most exultant cry".

The Morris Graves Centenary Invitational Art Exhibition & Seance

Morris Graves in his Leek Garden by Imogen Cunningham, Silver gelatin print, 1973

This month Morris Graves would have turned 100 years old. In his honor the Mystic Sons of Morris Graves, Seattle Lodge 93 will host the Morris Graves Centenary Invitational Art Exhibition & Seance. The exhibition will include works by members and friends of the fraternal order including homages to Graves as well as rare works created by Graves especially for the Seattle Lodge. 

The exhibition will begin tomorrow, August 5th, with a reception during Seattle's Pioneer Square First Thursdays from 5:00 to 8:00 PM at the Tashiro Kaplan artists cooperative. The exhibition will be open to the public on Saturdays through August 28th. On the 28th, Morris Graves 100th birthday, members of the Lodge will conduct a seance accompanied by Ajar West playing the Theremin.

Graves, my personal hero and role model, was a Seattle native and artist who came to international  renown in 1953 when a feature article in LIFE magazine, titled Mystic Painters of the Northwest, portrayed Graves as central to a group of Northwest artists inspired by Asian arts and philosophies and the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest.