EXERPTS FROM TRIP TO JAPAN
KATHI SMITH
It was with honor and delight that I accepted an invitation to teach a white-line printmaking workshop in Kamigori, Japan, a small town off Japan's inland sea. The workshop was held in conjunction with a joint exhibition of artists' work from the United States under ArtBridge Lamia Ink! and Japanese artists from the Hand Made Culture Group of Kamigori, Japan. Cortland Jessup, founder and director of LamiaInk!, has been building ArtBridges as a cultural and artistic exchange program between the two countries for the past eleven years, and invited me to exhibit with her group. The exhibition was comprised of artists' works in various media, crossing the cultural and language differences between the two countries and coming together using our common visual language as a means of communication and expression. The printmaking workshop was an offering to this group, whose Japanese artists have been making color woodcuts for centuries. It was my honor to introduce to Japan the American genre of the color woodcut print, a.k.a. the Provincetown Print.
In terms of cultural experience, my visit to Japan became so informative to my work that I decided to make that experience the focus of my upcoming exhibition to be held at the Schoolhouse Center in Provincetown in July. The area surrounding Kamigori, a small town larger than Provincetown but with much the same flavor of supportive community and artistic sophistication in a beautiful and natural setting, is mountainous, with a river running through it. We were invited to a traditional Japanese tea-ceremony, in this case on the banks of the river, and it coincided with the feast planned to celebrate the arrival of the cherry blossoms. It was a breathtakingly magical experience. I found myself drawn back to nature in a way that we find here when we allow ourselves to appreciate this place without our normal work-a-day agendas.
In Japan, as in Europe, and here, if we open our eyes to see them, the sky, free air space, was home to travel-paths for crows and ravens. They seemed to announce every magical moment, every change forewarned. They became constant companions, from Tokyo southwards and return. I watched them, first with interest, then fascination, then with the scientific scrutiny of the disbeliever. They never let me down.
The new work, based on this trip to a far-away place that felt very much like home, is based on the feeling of expansion, of moving forward, yet it also takes what has gone before and returns full circle. The Japanese prints have informed the American prints. Their work has been a reference point to me, a foundation upon which, as a printmaker, I have learned from and built upon. My own work, these past three plus decades, has gone through stylistic changes, informed by abstract expressionism, through realism, and back to a tightened but abstract format in an effort to communicate a more internalized point of view. This new work is about expansion, but expansion in a way that takes society and nature into account: it is "real" and "narrative" and uses symbols which we are all familiar with. It goes beyond the work which informed it, but it comes back to the point from which I started. It is my journey.
Kathi Smith is a printmaker and educator of the American genre of printmaking known as the Provincetown Print. She has been teaching and lecturing on the single-block color woodcut print process for the past fifteen years, as well as making and exhibiting her own prints. She was the first recipient of the LamiaInk! Art Bridge project's Travel Workshop Residency. Her work is in private and museum collections in the United States and internationally.