GRACE MUNAKATA  

I would like my paintings and collages to become a place where attention shifts and refocuses, a bit like the experience of walking in a wood where one notices the shadow moving before the bird.  The pieces hint at but contradict landscape space, and always contain some kind of weather where shapes float, drift, stack and move. For me they become specific places, where fragments, knots and stitches carry stories.

  A painted line may refer to a particular treelined ridge, or the lobed edge of a cloud from Japanese picture scrolls. A hermit thrush can shelter in dark shadows of the understory, surrounded by vivid Japanese 'stars' and 'chrysanthemums' whose loose geometric arrangement suggest a radiant enclosure.  

  I grew up in a Japanese-American home, my parents were Nisei.  My grandfather's gestural senryu poetry hung near a large painting of the Golden Gate Bridge.  In traditional glass and wood boxes, an exquisite Japanese doll was accompanied by a candle shaped like an open rose, a porcelain bouquet of flowers, a small wooden bear and rabbit, an egg wearing a red hat, flowing white beard and asian features of Santa Claus; everything could make sense together.

  My father practiced Japanese brush painting, sumi-e, at the formica kitchen table with several other men. The sensei (teacher) would make corrections in red sumi ink. Some of my earliest memories are watching miracles of marks becoming fish, flowers, grasshoppers- and my father painting a small mouse or horse for me in the corner of his drawing.

My mother was a seamstress. There were drawers full of patterned cottons and raw silk, every conceivable hue of thread, a blue metal box with jewel like buttons. Abstract pattern pieces were spread out on the floor. And transformations occurred regularly, nothing went to waste. An old shirt became an apron. Scraps of iridescent taffeta became ball gowns for Japanese dolls on the mantle.

  In 19th century rural Japan, thin spots on clothing or blankets were patched with fabric scraps. Over generations, patches on patches held together by running stitches literally carried a family's history.  Mending, re-using, prolonging, transforming out of frugality or temperament is part of human nature. I love that, 'boro' patches accumulate in the work.

  For me, paintings can hold everything, not at all random- but in service to its needs:  a house finch, a stamped pattern of rain, a paper take out box flies with discs of gold and blue. The ordinary and rare, grief and buoyancy, climate change and new leaves, all that we have been and how we will respond to new journeys.   -GM