Tom Nakashima

New Studio, Augusta, GA.

2010-10-01T08:20:00.000-07:00

August 29, 2010.

Untitled

2010-10-01T07:48:00.000-07:00

Moses Hawk: I just opened an old notebook I haven't used in years and this popped out. BONUS!!

Morgantown, W.V. 1975

2010-10-01T06:32:00.000-07:00

Lindsay Nakashima: I remember going up (to the attic studio) and smelling the turpentine and picking the oil blobs off dad's paintings. No ghosts, just party attendees who stayed over night and I found them in the morning.

"Monument to a Dying Planet"

2010-08-29T12:35:00.000-07:00

- on exhibit @ The Morris Museum of Art in 'A Painters Reel' until September 26th, 2010.

Vortex

2010-08-20T20:19:00.000-07:00

(click for larger-sized image)

'Vortex DC Patrice'

'Vortex Giorgio'

http://www.utakemusic.com/Home.html

Untitled

2010-08-20T20:06:00.000-07:00

Nakashima and Noguchi

Nakashima and Matisse

2010-07-05T10:23:00.000-07:00

"TOM NAKASHIMA found himself in fifteen states from the time he was born in Seattle until he grew up, in Iowa. His grandfather, a two-sword samurai, contrary to contemporary movement, took a covered wagon east. That's not true, Tom laughs: But the old man's ship did have a sail, and the lady he took for his wife had been a food taster for the Empress of Japan. That, plus the fact that his mother is Canadian, may or may not have anything to do with Tom's art ---- or that he toys with computers, plays games on grids, but has hair that is black and shaggy. That's him: depicted in the black ink brush paintings of wild and craggy bamboo mountain hermits. He could double, when he laughs, for Kanzan, but he passes you on the Appalachian streets in a Pontiac or a pick-up truck. "

WILL PETERSEN, Morgantown, WV - 1978.

Kanzan

Will and Tom - Chicago, IL.

Great Grandfather and Great Grandmother Nakashima

Grandfather and Grandmother Speagle

Interview Part One - @ the Hudgens Art Center, Duluth, GA, June 17, 2010.

2010-07-04T20:28:00.000-07:00

Question: what events led you to decide to become an artist?

Interview Part Two - @ the Hudgens Art Center, Duluth, GA, June 17, 2010.

2010-07-04T20:21:00.000-07:00

Question: what teachers and artists were most influential to you?

Interview Part Three - @ the Hudgens Art Center, Duluth, GA, June 17, 2010.

2010-07-04T19:53:00.000-07:00

Question: what artists were most influential to you? (continued: Will Petersen and others.)

Interview Part Four - @ the Hudgens Art Center, Duluth, GA, June 17, 2010.

2010-07-04T18:55:00.000-07:00

On Barnett Newman and Formalism

Interview Part Five - @ the Hudgens Art Center, Duluth, GA, June 17, 2010.

2010-07-04T14:55:00.000-07:00

On teaching.

Jim Garvey’s Article on me (not final)

2010-07-04T11:25:00.001-07:00

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 101^st 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 6^th 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]

“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.

[1]

Scholar in Art

[2]

Loras Academy

[3]

New Hope, Pennsylvania

[4]

woodworker and architect

[5]

Hamada Soji is correct in Japan but since Isamu Noguchi is used (first name first) we should use the samd for Hamada - Shoji Hamada

[6]

Some of their works

[7]

Most liberal arts art majors then minored in philosophy

[8]

They

[9]

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?

[10]

The Columbus College of Art & Design in Columbus, Ohio

[11]

perhaps this is what I said but I would prefer “… as if real innovation could not happen in the hinterlands”

[12]

a beer (I am not so cultured as some of my colleagues)

[13]

don’t know how to spell that—- looks funny. Maybe it should say Billie & Sissy Morris and ASU

The Hudgens Art Center, Duluth GA, May 25 - Sept. 25, 2010.

2010-07-04T11:01:00.000-07:00

St. Joseph Hall at Loras Academy, Dubuque, Iowa

2010-07-04T10:53:00.001-07:00

St. Joseph (Saint Jo) Hall, The building used for Loras Academy. I loved this school — it was like Lord of the Flies - what I learned there was mostly street smarts. We did not play hookey because the crazy environment at “The Academy” was just too much fun. We drove our “Profs” nuts dodging out windows and dropping to the ground or accross to an adjoining window and empty classroom —to hang out in the”quarry/parade field” smoking Luckys bummed from Sgt. Kucera our faculty conspiritor in crime. The building was vast and we could disappear from class for half an hour and zip back thru a window before the end of class. When the Academy closed in 1959 (my graduating class) we emptied every notebook and desk of paper bunching it up and filling the first floor up to eye level with balls of krinkled paper. It was a happening of the 1st order and probably much more exciting then anything that happened in NY later on.

2010-07-04T10:51:00.001-07:00

Lately I’ve been wondering — do artists still have deep thoughts like in the olden days? Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Sing along to the tune of Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World”

Don’t know much about his-tow-ri
Don’t know much about fe-la-so-fe
Don’t know much about assteticks book
Don’t know much about thos tests I took

But I do know that my art is kool
And if I keep clear of a golden rule
What a wonderful artist I be

Don’t know much about row-ko-ko-ko
Don’t know much about pea-ka-ah-so
Don’t know much about art the-o-ri
or even how to burn a dvd

But I do know that my art is hip
So don’t you go givin me no lip
bout what a confounded artist I be

Now I don’t claim to be a Saatchi Artist
But I am aiming to be
So maybe if i be a Saatchi Artist baby
I can get some big bucks for me

Don’t know much about his-tow-ri
Don’t know much about fe-la-so-fe
Don’t know much about assteticks book
Don’t know much about those tests I took

But I do know that I love kool
And I know that kool loves me too
Oh what an awesome artist I be

(shouting) Hey! Are there any big ideas out there?

When I was in school we got BAs instead of BFAs, and art majors minored in philosophy. We had hours of spontaneous discussions based on big ideas. We were aware of style but only spoke of it with reference to the concepts it held. You can talk about style in the art world in the same way you talk about style in shoes. I am sure that there are brilliant professors at FIT who could go on for hours about philosophy and style. Well I’m not talking about that. That’s real style — not fashion. I’m talking about “ What Not To Wear”. If you listen to that show I promise that you will never encounter a single deep thought. Unfortunately the show is pretty much like an undergraduate painting critique gone wrong.

I tell my students this: “If you want to think seriously about art, you first need to have a philosophy of life and a theology or anti-theology to match. This can then be followed by something like an aesthetic or stylistic philosophy. If you want to believe that the world began with a prime mover— then you must follow through with everything that this kind of thinking logically entails. If you believe there is a god and you believe that your God is perfect — then she must know everything that is, was and will be — and if this is true you must come to grips with the concept of predestination. You should probably choose either the Hindu (see Indra’s Web), Augustinian or Calvinist version.” I then ask this question of my students, “If this God can stand at the pearly gates and identify good and evil - - should she not be equally competent at identifying with exactness the natures of beauty, ugly, true, false and art or not art?”

I could frankly give a shit whether or not my students believe in god. I present this idea because it opens the doors to some of the most fundamental questions that artists must resolve before going on to questions like “What is the nature of art?” If you are a Thomist, that question might initiate one line of thinking — if you are an existentialist you must go down a different path to answer that same question.

Can you be a postmodernist and a Christian at the same time? Can I be an existentialist and think of perfection in the same context as a positivist? Can a Taoist believe in beauty without reference to ugly? Can you follow Foucault and still speak in the same way about line, shape and color? Can form continue to stand supreme with regard to content? Is it fair for me to assume that my students want to communicate……to inform….to express….. to know? Is there really anything to teach if there is no longer a “way”??? And if you don’t like the way things are going —— do you really believe it is possible to return? To what? To modernism? Yea, I wish…. but I don’t think so.
I am starting to think that Modernism was just a nice dream that I had. Did you have it too? It did seem like a good dream at the time. Boy could I get excited about talking about the absence of hierarchical forms in Stella. It was just a good narcotic that made me feel smart when really I wasn’t.

I could think of an argument for a “big idea” that would give apology to Murakami, Koons or Damian Hirst — but you don’t hear much discussion about things like that — do you?
You hear mostly about style — as in shoes.

beginagain!

Tom Nakashima 5/28/09

(shouting) Hey! Are there any big ideas out there?

When I was in school we got BAs instead of BFAs, and art majors minored in philosophy. We had hours of spontaneous discussions based on big ideas. We were aware of style but only spoke of it with reference to the concepts it held. You can talk about style in the art world in the same way you talk about style in shoes. I am sure that there are brilliant professors at FIT who could go on for hours about philosophy and style. Well I’m not talking about that. That’s real style — not fashion. I’m talking about “ What Not To Wear”. If you listen to that show I promise that you will never encounter a single deep thought. Unfortunately the show is pretty much like an undergraduate painting critique gone wrong.

I tell my students this: “If you want to think seriously about art, you first need to have a philosophy of life and a theology or anti-theology to match. This can then be followed by something like an aesthetic or stylistic philosophy. If you want to believe that the world began with a prime mover— then you must follow through with everything that this kind of thinking logically entails. If you believe there is a god and you believe that your God is perfect — then she must know everything that is, was and will be — and if this is true you must come to grips with the concept of predestination. You should probably choose either the Hindu (see Indra’s Web), Augustinian or Calvinist version.” I then ask this question of my students, “If this God can stand at the pearly gates and identify good and evil - - should she not be equally competent at identifying with exactness the natures of beauty, ugly, true, false and art or not art?”

I could frankly give a shit whether or not my students believe in god. I present this idea because it opens the doors to some of the most fundamental questions that artists must resolve before going on to questions like “What is the nature of art?” If you are a Thomist, that question might initiate one line of thinking — if you are an existentialist you must go down a different path to answer that same question.

Can you be a postmodernist and a Christian at the same time? Can I be an existentialist and think of perfection in the same context as a positivist? Can a Taoist believe in beauty without reference to ugly? Can you follow Foucault and still speak in the same way about line, shape and color? Can form continue to stand supreme with regard to content? Is it fair for me to assume that my students want to communicate……to inform….to express….. to know? Is there really anything to teach if there is no longer a “way”??? And if you don’t like the way things are going —— do you really believe it is possible to return? To what? To modernism? Yea, I wish…. but I don’t think so.
I am starting to think that Modernism was just a nice dream that I had. Did you have it too? It did seem like a good dream at the time. Boy could I get excited about talking about the absence of hierarchical forms in Stella. It was just a good narcotic that made me feel smart when really I wasn’t.

I could think of an argument for a “big idea” that would give apology to Murakami, Koons or Damian Hirst — but you don’t hear much discussion about things like that — do you?
You hear mostly about style — as in shoes.

beginagain!

Tom Nakashima 5/28/09

About my faith.

2010-07-04T10:49:00.001-07:00

May - 2010

I was raised Catholic by logical and scientific minded parents. The word “Catholic” is important because the argument for the Church dogma was founded (more or less) using logic as handed down from Aristotle to Aquinas — thus Aristotelian Thomistic Philosophy. While it is true that Church theology at times appears more rationalistic than rational, as a 2nd grader I was unaware of these nuances while reading the Baltimore Catechism. My world was neatly constructed around the “fact” that our world and our religion were products of a logical super-being who was as precise at creating the metaphysical as he was at creating the physical. It would seem that we could see all the cards on the table “face up”, so we had no need of resorting to “faith”. Faith was a word bandied about willy-nilly, but it was not given the genuine credence that it was within evangelic religions.

At Loras College while working on an art major, I studied theology in a time when theologian Harvey Cox (an ordained Baptist Minister at Harvard) questioned the very foundations of all organized religion. He encouraged studying all religious ideas. By graduate school (at Notre Dame) I was an atheist. However my logical thinking (the residue of Catholic schools) continued to drive my paintings — paintings which tried to be sufficiently logical that no previous artistic knowledge was necessary for them to inform the viewer. Barnett Newman, Frank Stella and Robert Mangold were my model artist. Particularly Mangold whose works could have been inscribed into a tablet on Voyager and sent out into the far reaches of space. These works used a language that was so universal it would most likely be understood by any being possessing visual or tactile senses. Wittgenstein provided the philosophical direction that encouraged Stella and others to produce works in this genre. I loved doing this kind of painting but I knew that love and emotions had nothing to do with art — so I backtracked to Barnett Newman — and through him to Kant and The Sublime.

A year or so ago I ran across a podcast of a course by Hubert Dreyfus on Existentialism in Literature and Art . I had always been interested in existential philosophy, but I just could not understand what it was all about. In short - my logical thinking was in the way. Through Kierkegaard I learned about the leap of faith, and the knight of faith and I was hooked. From there I went to Dostoyevsky and the novel I could never get through — The Brothers Karamazov . It took me almost a year!

My 30 foot painting Brothers Karamazov chronicles my reading.

Logic is no longer on my list of necessities for good painting.

I now have faith — but not in a God.