About Me
Background
Julia Takahashi started her artistic career as a ceramicist, became a practicing architect and is now working in oil, collage, mixed media and sculpture. She is a Happa with a Japanese father and a mother from an old New England family. This background in the context of American race relations provided her with a strong grounding in the power of being a bridge between cultures. She grew up in Boulder, Colorado and now lives in the Nambe River Valley north of Santa Fe, New Mexico where she has her studio. She has an undergraduate degree in Environmental Design and a Masters in Architecture and Urban Design. She took some art courses during her academic years, but most of her training has been through apprenticeship, mentorship, non-accredited classes and her own study and practice.
Inspiration to Create
True creativity required the letting go of preconceptions of what is good art, what one thinks one should paint and how to paint. This opening up of influences apart from the conscious mind is difficult and int he process the artist must grapple with the concept of who she thinks she is and the shadowy realms of what she is afraid to reveal.
No matter how difficult, progress begins to reveal a truer self that is more freely creative; a self that is not longer looking to others for directions but rather experiencing the light of inspiration and using it to explore the soul's dimension. I paint because it engages me in this journey to meet and express the intersection of psyche and spirit.
Much current inspiration comes from the storied landscape that surrounds me in Northern New Mexico. Daily, I watch the sun transverse across the wide vistas, the clouds shape and reshape, the shadows short and long and at the end of the day the glorious sunsets that grace this part of the world. At night, I seek out the Milky Way in our velvety black skies and believe that I have a special relationship with the moon. I find a sense of comfort and peacefulness in this landscape.
Artist's Statement
My work explores the Japanese aesthetic and philosophical notion of mono no aware. A direct translation of mono no aware is “things of wow-ness!” Although the meaning is most often translated as “transience of life” or “the bittersweet poignancy of things.". In my paintings, I create dichotomies of luminescence and decay, of color and non-color and the use of marks and gestures that float over one another to create depth and to express my deeply felt sense of the multitudinous layers that make up our world and our lives.
I create from a place of intentional spontaneity. While each stoke of the brush or gesture is intentional, it is executed without pre-planning or forethought. My first marks are feeling based often after meditation and made with energy.
In later stages, I allow my subconscious to further interpret the early layers and to guide me towards the finished work.
Artistic Statement for Imperfect Beauty Series
The Imperfect Beauty series is a surrender to the materials and processes of working in oil media and a celebration of the freedom achieved through spontaneous and energetic mark making.
In nature we find the form of a twig, a leaf, a flower etched into being by the forces around it – sun, wind, water, season and its interaction with other living creatures – a myriad of variations on the eidos or perfect form. In this series the gesture, the mark, the paint stroke expresses a fleeting moment in time against a canvas that has been painted and scraped to capture the feeling of the eroded, the rusted, the peeling aspects of elements exposed to time.
Imperfect Beauty is about things not fully revealed and the hidden and lingering emotions expressed within the gesture. It takes its direction from the Japanese aesthetic concept of Wabi and the enjoyment that can be found in the natural imperfection of things. Imperfection as deliberate choice engages both the maker and the observer in a journey into a deeper understanding. It surprises us, stimulating our imagination and gives rise to the question, “Why?” And in doing so we are led into a greater understanding and appreciation.
Note: I decouple Wabi here from the popular and now commercialized term Wabi-sabi. Wabi is its own complex concept which is more of a finely tuned sensitivity to the emotive and affective aspects arising from the idealization of a hermit’s life and its closeness to nature that was brought to aesthetic flowering by Zen tea masters in 16th Century Japan. To begin to understand Wabi one must go back to the pre-Buddhist Shinto roots of Japanese culture and its shamanic twining of man and nature, the sense of wholeness with the earth and the acceptance of the flux of life. Wabi was part of the philosophical movement away from the cultural influence of the Tang Dynasty and the rediscovery and elevation of a true Japanese culture. Should we be surprised that the emotion of a simple and sometimes challenging life dependent on the natural environment is found in the critical core of Japanese culture?
Artistic Statement for Genesis Series
The Genesis series evolved out of working with the ideas of inner light. In this series, circular and ovate shapes arose from a field of gestural marks with the feeling of light emanating within these forms. They are symbolic of the birthing of creativity from the unified or quantum field and express the artist’s experiences that art and design are a manifestation of something beyond her own mind. The imagery is both cellular and interstellar as our human experience of genesis now extends from the watery earth and the images brought to us from deep space.
Artistic Statement for Inner Light Series
Although these works are initiated in the present moment, there is a timeless quality in imagery drawn from the the unconscious that is poetic in meaning: light seeping through cracks and along edges; processions of light , pilgrimage, refugees, energy rising - spreading - dripping and pooling; starlight and galaxies; the passage of time and Paleolithic rituals. These visual and poems transverse time and link the individual to an inner journey as well as our collective human odyssey.
Artistic Statement for Ukraine Series
When the first images began to disseminate after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I was struck with a deep sorrow looking at the blackened windows of buildings with wisps of smoke from still smoldering fires drifting up and beyond. The architect me couldn’t get beyond the thought, “Life used to occur behind those now blown out windows.” Having spent so many years designing for the happy and productive life of people and making certain that structures were safe and healthy, it was and still is difficult to get beyond this senseless destruction and the loss of life in all of its meanings.
I started the Ukraine Series to express this sadness. They are emotionally hard to paint as I put myself in the most empathetic state of mind. There is more to say and it will be revealed in time.
Experiments
Sometimes the studio is the laboratory for new ideas and one just has to experiment freely and see what comes into being.