急がば回れ Hurry Slowly: Mayuko Ono Gray

Reflecting a life which is both culturally Japanese and American, my graphite drawings hybridize influences from traditional Japanese calligraphy combined with Western drawing practices and aesthetics.

Growing up in Japan, every Saturday afternoon was spent with my Sensei, a calligraphy master who would assign words for each of us to practice. We would spend hours producing copies of the Sensei’s sample. The goal was to imitate the sample, paying attention to the line quality, the varying speed, the pressure and angle of the brush movement. The handling of the brush had to become rhythmic and graceful.

At high school age, in preparation to entrance exam to art university in Japan, I had to take private lessons to learn drawing with graphite and charcoal practicing techniques such as chiaroscuro and sfumato. Saturday afternoons were replaced by a Western style art studio with pedestals, still lives, and white marble copies of Roman busts, instead of tatami mat calligraphy studio sitting on the floor. The fluid ink was replaced with malleable graphite and ephemeral charcoal. The wet immediacy of calligraphic line was replaced with illusionistic volumes meticulously rendered. Instead of going through dozens of rice papers in a session, one sheet of high-quality cotton paper was given to work on.

Traditional Asian art-forms have often integrated word and image, and my interest and practice also follow the path in my unique way. In my works I mostly use images of persons, animals, and still-lifes captured in my daily experiences. I assign a matching Japanese proverb to go with the image, which is spelled out with hiragana and kanji characters intertwined to create a single line. The calligraphic line begins at the top right and end toward the bottom left of the page, following traditional Asian writing. The single line going through a pictorial plane is a metaphor of a life; the continuation of our life which begins with the birth and entrance to physical body, one exit as death and loss of physical body, and all the complicated path we take in between. Proverbs are short and poetic, yet powerful and true, resonating to us today confirming the never changing characteristics of human emotions and behavior, providing timeless lessons and teachings.