Dead trees:
Piled in orchards ready for burning. Stacked in log piles bound for paper mills. Leaning in tepees for campfires.
In forms sometimes bewilderingly complex and beautiful, sometimes brutally simple, these fallen trees have taken hold of the imagination of artist Tom Nakashima. His monumental paintings of them, tangled and ambiguous, carry many layers of association and meaning.
Nakashima is in his eighth and final year as Morris Eminent Chair of[1] Art at Augusta State University (a position previously held by Jim Rosen and Philip Morsberger). He came here in 2002 from Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where he was chair of the art department. Most of his work there had been idea-driven and political, protesting nuclear arms or American intervention in Latin America. Then one day in Berryville, Virginia., the rural town of fruit orchards where he lived 70 miles west of Washington, he saw a tangled pile of trees which had been pulled up out of an orchard to make way for a housing development.
It was terrible; and it was beautiful: as a visual form, the tree pile was stunning. But it also marked the transition from orchard to ticky-tacky urban sprawl. Nakashima couldn’t get the image out of his mind. He began photographing tree piles, then experimenting with ways of painting them.
But as he got deeper and deeper into the images he painted, he came to realize that these weren’t simply markers of an ecological crisis, the encroachment of the city on the country. It wasn’t just man destroying nature to replace it with the man-made. After all, the orchards themselves were man-made, and farmers periodically pull up the old trees to make way for the new. So at one level his paintings were about aging, making way for the young. At another level they drew on his cultural background as a Japanese-American.
“Just about nothing is natural in Japan,” he explained. “In China and Japan torturous things are done to nature, like foot-binding and bonsai, taking something in nature and making it the way man wants it. I’d drawn a lot of bonsai trees. They’re like orchards, because orchards are not nature. They’re man-designed. They’re full of pesticides. So these tree piles have those elements of man controlling nature. Maybe it’s not terrible replacing nature with ticky-tacky houses, maybe that’s not the bad replacing the good. It’s really a cyclical thing, and when it gets bad enough man will be destroyed and nature will recover.”
These woodpiles, first encountered in 1999, marked a turning point in Nakashima’s artistic direction. Up to that point his paintings had been driven by ideas; he had been a rather intellectual and inward painter not really interested in depicting the external landscape. Now he was painting an actual object, one with infinite complexity. Since he didn’t want to get bogged down in the torturous, meticulous work of reproducing in paint every tangle, every twist of every twig in the orderly chaos of these piles, he turned to an old artistic technique: using a grid to map out, enlarge, and recreate the image.
He divided a photograph of the woodpile into grid units. Then he attached hundreds of pages of the National Geographic to the wall (in different paintings he has used collages of other publications), each one corresponding to one square of the grid. He painted each page using the corresponding grid of the photograph. Each piece of the grid became, in effect, a separate abstract painting, a kind of zen meditation; seen all together, these separate paintings, with the National Geographic images bleeding through, were the woodpile.
“I concentrate on the squares with totality,” Nakashima told Jay Williams in an interview for an exhibition of his work at the Morris Museum of Art in 2007. “I leave the world behind and forget the 230 squares that remain. There, in the mindlessness of space, hidden within the rules I find ample room for gesture and abandon.” Ample room, indeed. Nakashima loves painting on a heroic scale: Westwood Road Nocturne measures 110 x 165 inches; Stewart’s Sticks is 103 x 288 inches.
The life of a vital artist is a journey. It had taken years for Nakashima to get to his woodpiles, the most recent stage, and certainly not the last one. He is constantly pushing, probing, taking chances.
“The theologian-physicist John Polkinghorne says that innovation and change only occur when two thing come together cataclysmically—chaos and order. It’s true in the physical universe and I think that’s true of art, too. If you don’t walk close to the edge, if you’re not there about to tumble over, then you’ll never make art. There’s an old Japanese saying: ‘If you want to catch the tiger cub, you’ve got to go into the den.’ You’ve got to be willing to face the danger and wrath in the cave.”
Nakashima, an affable man with a ready laugh and a love of good company, doesn’t seem to be afraid of much. After a disastrous first semester of college he dropped out, volunteered for the draft, and served for three years in the elite 101st Airborne Division. He was in the air over Florida, preparing to parachute into Cuba during the Cuba missile crisis. Was he scared?
“No,” he said, laughing. “We had no sense of danger. We envisioned jumping out over some village in Cuba, spraying the bush, killing all the Commies, then driving through the streets of Havana and having beautiful women throw fruit at us a day later. We thought it was a great adventure.”
Army life was nothing new to Tom Nakashima. He had grown up on Army bases
as his father, an Army physician during World War II and Korea, moved from post to
post. When Tom was in 6th grade the family settled in Dubuque, Iowa, and there he went
to high school and college. His mother was an Irish Catholic from Canada, so Tom had a
Catholic education at Loras High School[2] and, when he returned from the Army, Loras College.
In summer there were visits to his uncle, George Nakashima, in California[3] . George was a very famous woodworker and furniture maker[4] , and his friends were some of the greatest contemporary artists: Ben Shahn, Morris Graves, Mark Tobey, Hamada Soji[5] , Isamu Noguchi.. Their works[6] filled his uncle’s house. He didn’t realize how remarkable that was until he studied art in college and saw their works on the pages of his textbooks.
“So being an artist was always something right there in my mind. But as a second-generation Japanese-American, my dad’s practical interpretation of the fact that I drew well was that I should be an architect.”
Nakashima went on to study art in graduate school at Notre Dame University. All art majors[7] minored in philosophy, studying logic, aesthetics, the history of philosophy, and ethics. Philosophy remains an important influence in his life and work. In a 1990 interview he told his friend Lynn Schmidt, “I always tell my students that if you don’t have a philosophy of life, you can’t be an artist. From a philosophy of life should stem—even if you don’t think about it—your philosophy of art. I mean you can paint paintings and call yourself an artist but there has to be something there. I think that an artist should have fundamental beliefs in a ethical system, an aesthetic system, and a system of living. Maybe that’s why a lot of artists are all screwed up—because they can’t get all those things together. Thet[8] are doing a kind of painting that has nothing to do with their actual beliefs.”
Though he is no longer a practicing Catholic, Nakashima’s way of thinking and perceiving the world has been deeply influenced by the Aristotelian philosophy which was the basis of his Catholic education, and by the church’s rich symbolism, aesthetics, and belief in the priest’s power to transform matter into spirit[9] —for that is what Nakashima aspires to do as an artist. His intellectual and spiritual development have added Zen Buddhism and Existentialism to the mix, and these have, in turn, modified the direction of his art; but he remains deeply philosophical in his approach to life and art.
Nakashima taught at[10] West Virginia University in Morgantown, West Virginia, then Catholic University in Washington, D.C., before coming to Augusta State as Morris Chair. In each of these places he has soaked in the local environment. Like many artists, he once thought of New York City as the center of the art world, but he has come to see that in the United States, as in Europe, it’s the painters at the edges, far from the so-called art centers, who do the most creative work.
“New York art critics try to marginalize regional painters. Many regions produce very strong work, many of those painters do come to New York, then New York claims them. For example, the abstract expressionists: Jackson Pollock was from Wyoming, Franz Klein was from Pennsylvania, Willem de Kooning was Dutch. The vision of the New Yorker is that when you’re paying that kind of rent for a loft, this is the bellybutton of the universe and there’s nowhere else you could be. I’ve had New York painters come when I was in West Virginia and say, ‘How can you come up with this out there?’ as if it were a third-rate state.
[11]
[11]
“Anyway, I don’t believe in the idea of the importance of having creative colleagues constantly feeding you ideas. Painters are oddballs, non-communal compared to other artists. They go up to the studio and work on things by themselves. If I need intelligent conversation, there’s as much of it going on at the Bee’s Knees or wherever in Augusta as I ever heard in D.C. I have spent lots of time in New York City and never once did I come across any conversations about big ideas—not in New York!”
So what’s the quality of place Nakashima finds here? He loves the Georgia landscape, the southern accent, even the summer heat. He loves the weekly gatherings of colleagues and friends for conversation and wine[12] Friday afternoons at the Bee’s Knees. He has done lots of sketches of scenes around Augusta, painted some Georgia woodpiles, and painted a stark, abandoned building in a work with the tongue-in-cheek title, The Devil Came Down to Georgia.
“I have a strong response to landscape and I’ve always spent a lot of time outdoors, but my history of painting has not usually been about my environment. The majority of my work here has been a continuation of stuff begun in Berryville.”
And he loves the Morris Chair. “If there’s another job in art like the Morris Chair and what you get out of it, I don’t know what it is, and Philip Morsberger agrees with me. You teach one class, you get a discretionary budget to travel to art shows, to bring in speakers. You get to do your work without interference.”.
After he steps down as Morris Chair this summer, Nakashima and his wife, Lindsey, plan to stay in Augusta at least another four years, until their youngest daughter, Madina, graduates from high school.
Nakashima has had more than 30 solo exhibitions, his work is in the permanent collections of more than 50 museums, and he has been written about in hundreds of publications all over the world; but he’s found in Augusta an environment conducive to his creativity and open to his vision and philosophy. “The people of Augusta have always treated me wonderfully. I’m grateful to the Morrises[13] for making my life here possible.”
And as long as the countryside around Augusta continues to be clear-cut, subdivided, paved, and suburbanized, there will be no end of tangled treepiles to mark the path to the future.
Scholar in Art
Loras Academy
New Hope, Pennsylvania
woodworker and architect
Hamada Soji is correct in Japan but since Isamu Noguchi is used (first name first) we should use the samd for Hamada - Shoji Hamada
Some of their works
Most liberal arts art majors then minored in philosophy
They
I am not sure what is correct here. Transubstantiation is the change in substance the occurs during the concrecration (bread & wine into body & blood. I don’t think matter turns into spirit but we need to discuss this. Please can I bring in my consultant in the Vatican?
The Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio
perhaps this is what I said but I would prefer “… as if real innovation could not happen in the hinterlands”
a beer (I am not so cultured as some of my colleagues)
don’t know how to spell that—- looks funny. Maybe it should say Billie & Sissy Morris and ASU
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