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OAKVILLE BEAVER · Wednesday, March 4, 2009 18 Artscene Woodcut artist printing her name into art history Naoko Matsubara solo shows open in Pittsburgh By Tina Depko OAKVILLE BEAVER STAFF "If I was not doing art, I would have been an unhappy person." This is the response that comes from Naoko Matsubara when asked if there was another other career path she would have liked to follow. She clearly chose correctly, as the Oakvillebased artist has spent close to 50 years honing her craft and is considered one of the leading contemporary woodblock print artists. The art world's fascination with her vivid and bold work continues with a retrospective exhibition called Matsubara: A Celebration in Pittsburgh, which opens at the Carnegie Museum of Art on Saturday and runs to June 7. The exhibition of more than 60 woodblock prints is a visual overview of Matsubara's career, from her earliest prints, where she investigated representational imagery using innovative black-and-white techniques, to her current experimentation with abstraction and vivid colour. Solo shows at prestigious art institutions are nothing new for Matsubara. Her work has been displayed on its own in many notable exhibitions, particularly in recent years. One example was Tree Spirit: The Woodcuts of Naoko Matsubara at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2003, which was so popular that the show's closing date was extended. However, the Pittsburgh show holds particular meaning for Matsubara. Many of the earlier prints on display in this exhibition were created when Matsubara spent a year in Pittsburgh in the early 1960s while completing a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now known as Carnegie Mellon University. "They have so many artists in the United States, about 10 times the number we have in Canada, that's why it is so exciting to have an American museum have a solo show for me," she said during an interview last week in her light-filled studio. "That is a very big honour." Other institutions in Pittsburgh are also taking the opportunity to showcase the renowned artist, with a related exhibition, Matsubara: Illuminations, running concurrently at Chatham University. The show features Matsubara's book projects and watercolour hand scrolls. Matsubara and her husband, retired University of Toronto professor David Waterhouse, travelled to the American city earlier this week to celebrate the opening of KAREN NEWMAN / OAKVILLE BEAVER RENOWNED ARTIST: Naoko Matsubara is in Pittsburgh this week celebrating the opening of two solo art shows. the two exhibitions. "It is a very big festival all week for me," she said. "I have to give two public lectures, a demonstration, I will be on a panel discussion of book art, interviewed by media, and every single night there will be a banquet." It took an extensive amount of preparation to produce the Pittsburgh shows. Two curators from the Carnegie Museum of Art travelled to Oakville in 2007 and 2008, spending hours going through Matsubara's artwork to select pieces for the exhibition. The curators also went through the museum's own collection of Matsubara masterpieces. "The Carnegie Museum has been collecting my work for years," she said. "Many museums in the United States are collecting my work, but they have the best of my early work. This show is very important. It covers from 1967 to 2008." Meanwhile, noted Japanese print expert and Chatham University senior scholar Sandy Kita was given the task of curating the school's Matsubara exhibition. The story behind Matsubara's rise from a young art-loving girl living in Kyoto, Japan to an internationally-renowned artist now residing in Oakville is fascinating, to say the least. Self-described as a quiet child, Matsubara said she was often absorbed in creating art. She recalls spending countless hours with crayons and paper. Although working as an artist was always in her mind, the fear of poverty nearly held her back. Matsubara credits her mother for helping her overcome her hesitations and pursue her dream. "I knew I loved art, but artists are poor and I didn't want to be poor," she said. "And then my mother took me to her friend who was a university professor to help me choose what I wanted to do. The professor asked me what I liked to do more than anything, and I said, `Art.' He said, go do art then. And that was it." After graduating from the Kyoto City College of Art, now the Kyoto Academy of Fine Arts, Matsubara travelled to the United States as a Fulbright Scholar, electing to study at Carnegie Institute, turning down offers from Yale and Cranbrook Academy of Art in the process. She dabbled in a variety of media during her first few months at graduate school, searching for a medium in which to specialize. Inspiration finally came during her first Ravi Shankar concert. "I shook with excitement by this incredible music and the presence of the singer," she recalled "I had nothing to draw with, but I had the tiny program they give you, so in the margin I did a little bit of line drawing. The next morning, I went to the studio and I asked for some good wood because I wanted to make woodcuts." This request was met with the production of what Matsubara said was a large piece of the "hardest, cheapest plywood." She cut the wood into manageable-sized pieces and started carving. Hours later, the result was two woodcut prints of Shankar. "It was then my inner voice said, `Isn't this what you were looking for?'" she recalled. "To this day, I don't know why I did it with woodcut. I could have painted, could have made sculpture, but I did woodcut. Afterward, I couldn't stop myself making woodcuts and after almost 50 years, I'm still going." After teaching stints at several prestigious American schools, a chance meeting and subsequent love story with David resulted in her happily relocating to Oakville 38 years ago. Despite hectic work schedules, Matsubara and her husband raised a son, Yoshiki Waterhouse, who is now working on a master's degree in architecture at Harvard. "We are so proud of him," she said. Matsubara said she is her own toughest critic. Inspired by literature, nature and her travels, the Oakville artist said she has more ideas for prints than hours in the day to realize them. She continues to make the short journey from her back door to her studio daily on her never-ending quest towards artistic perfection. "People say `Isn't it nice you have a hobby?' when it is more than that," she said. "It is torture. You expect yourself to be there and you can't, so you try and once in a while you do it, then the next minute you are back down. You'll create 10 masterpieces and you say, `Yes, I did it.' Then the next day you are back down there." The arrival of 2009 has marked the beginning of a very busy period for Matsubara. Besides the two Pittsburgh exhibitions, Matsubara's work is also currently on display as part of a show called Daughters of Sun Goddess. Japanese Femininity running until May 18 at Sinebrychoff Art Museum in Helsinki, Finland. Matsubara will return to Pittsburgh in May, when she will receive an honorary doctorate from Chatham University. Her artwork will also be featured in a solo show at Toronto's Craig Scott Gallery this autumn.