<Begin Segment 48>

RS: And it was at one of those auctions where I was buying furniture, buying all kinds of things, necessities, when -- I was there with one of my colleagues. And there was this farmer standing next to me. And I still remember him. And he was wearing these blue coveralls and he kept nudging closer to me. And finally, during a break in the auction, he said, "Excuse me, sir," he said, "I was overhearing you speak the language, and I was wondering how you come to speaking it so good. Where are you from?" And I said, "I'm from Seattle." And he says, "No," he says, "Where are your parents from?" And I said, "Well, my mother was born in Idaho, and my father was born in Seattle." And I knew what he was after, but I had just decided, since these were questions that I'd probably answered half-a-dozen times prior to this conversation, that I would only answer him truthfully, and give him what he asked. And when he said, "Are you a student at Haskell?" And I said, "No, I teach at KU." "What do you teach?" I said, "I teach painting." And he said, "Well, what's your ancestry?" or something like that. I says, "Well, I'm Japanese, Japanese American." And he says, "Well, konnichi wa." And I kind of looked at him, and he said, "The little lady and I lived in Japan." And he said, "We used to buy them pictures of 'gishi' girls wearin' them kimonos." And he says, "Do you do pictures like that?" And I just kind of shrugged my shoulders and just sort of said, "Yeah." And my friend that was with me was just laughing hysterically. And I just wanted to get away from this guy. So for the rest of the auction I thought about that conversation. And it wasn't as though it was so different from other conversations, but he had sort of summarized, he brought in everything, into that one conversation.

So I went home and I wrote down that conversation on a piece of paper, just sort of scripted it like this. And then I went to the Student Union, and I bought this book that was called A Coloring Book of Japan. And it was filled with ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Line, simple, simple line drawings. And I took it to my studio, and I did this big painting. It was called, I called "Oriental Masterpiece." And in it was a Utamaro woman and a Hokusai wave, and a Sotatsu demon. My thought at the time was just to do this one painting. And it was in direct response to that conversation. So, I mean, I think that was maybe a first in my work, that I had a artistic response to a conversation that was very bothersome to me.

And, and I was also on the throes of my first solo show in Seattle. The one at Earl Ballard was on Mercer Island, and the show was at the old Jim Manolides Gallery. And there was enough space in this mini gallery for eight paintings. And so the last painting I had done was this "Oriental Masterpiece," number one. All the other seven paintings were of images from pulp magazines and from comic strips. And there were Buck Rogers, Big Bad Wolf paintings, Mickey, Minnie Mouse, things like that. And so I shipped all the paintings up. I came up for the opening, and amazingly, everybody talked about "Oriental Masterpiece." And the reason they talked about it was they saw it as a homecoming of sorts. They thought, "You're doing paintings like, look like you. That look like you." And I, you know, I couldn't quite understand that, because I felt like these images were very foreign to me. They didn't feel natural. I mean, they looked Japanese. And it's because I never had those images while growing up. Those things were never around the house. Those were the images that I associated with my grandparents. And so I decided -- because of that very sort of different kind of relationship I suddenly had with my work and with the people that were looking and commenting at my work -- I decided that I'd do a series called "Oriental Masterpiece." And as it turns out, I ended up doing almost fifty paintings, and they're all 5 x 5 feet. And I also did a series of prints that were called "Oriental Masterprints." And so, for the first time, my prints and my paintings were doing something very similar to each other. And so that was probably about four years' worth of work that I did on that series.

<End Segment 48> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.