A beautiful hot summer day, my daughter and I rode a long,
scenic train ride North of the city.
We arrived at a farm and met with the artist Aya Eukawa, her young
daughter and her husband, also an artist.
There were bees buzzing around and carrots for the girls to
feed to the bunnies. We spent the early afternoon picking strawberries in the
vast fields. This idyllic setting was the start of a peaceful and inspiring
visit
Following our family fun time, Aya and I got down to
business and to the other side of our lives as artists.
We traveled from the farm over to an old high school
building that now serves as studios. When we entered Aya's studio space, I was overwhelmed at the
size and power of female figures commanding the space. Aya is currently working on two 10-foot
tall acrylic paintings of sad, stoic women. One of them, inspired by German Renaissance painter Lucas
Cranach's Venus, is covered in finely
detailed hair growing over her entire body, like a depiction of Eve as a feral
goddess. This woman also resembles Aya a bit since she used herself as a
partial reference - to me this gave the figure even more power. The other
figure stands commanding a raging bull with ornate fur painted one tiny line at
a time. For the subject
matter of this painting, Aya referenced the horrible ancient Greek torture and
execution device known as the Brazen Bull. Aya's woman stands within the bull accepting of her fate,
sad but defiant in her composure.
Both of these figures are larger than life depictions of
controlled, female sadness but with power in that control. They are absolutely reminiscent of
early Italian Renaissance figures but with a much more graphic quality so that
they seem to move between reality and dreams. Their perfectly smooth rendered flesh against the obsessive,
graphic patterning of their hair and clothes along with the stark surrounding
space absent of detail, gives them more mystery than there would be in a more
specific setting. In response to
my question about why her figures are almost always these sad, controlled
women, Aya refers to her personal history growing up in Japan. She feels that this kind of control
permeates the culture in which she was raised and she found it especially
notable in the women of her family. She sees it as a kind of cultural defense and to avoid revealing too many emotions or weaknesses.
Aya will be showing these two paintings, in a three-person
show at the Baltimore Museum of Art in March.
In selecting work for the upcoming Spring tART show, I kept
in the back of my mind the idea of conversations between works that Jess Levey
brought up when visiting my studio.
Aya had a couple of delicate pencil drawings in her studio that I felt
brought a similar sense of unintentional communication between the works. The first is a study for another
painting of a head, just a head, with detailed long flowing hair alluding to
the thought that this head has just rolled to where it is quietly sitting. Despite the fact that it is a study for
a larger painting it holds the same narrative of stoic sadness. The second is a
study for the painting with the bull. It is a profile portrait seeming to look
not with shock or horror towards the disembodied head on the paper next to it
but simply with controlled regret.
Composure is the dominating presence in all of Aya's works. Pairing these two drawings maintains
the composure of both the victim (of the assumed beheading) as well as the
witness to that horror. There is no panic anywhere to be seen despite the
panic-worthy conditions. There is
sadness and strength in control. This is true in the stories of the women that
are presented as well as in the obsessive, clean techniques of the artist.
I left with the knowledge that we must keep going, keep steadily working, with our heads held high despite what hardships we face. We are strong, we can breathe through anything and just keep working.
