Matsubara Naoko

• Name — Matsubara Naoko • Education — Kyoto University of Applied Arts in 1960; MFA in the School of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh • Known for — graphic artist Matsubara Naoko is a Japanese-Canadian print-maker.

Matsubara was born in Tokushima, Shikoku, the daughter of a Shinto priest; her family moved to Kyoto in 1941. She graduated from the Kyoto University of Applied Arts (Kyoto Geijutsu Daigaku) in 1960. She then pursued an MFA in the School of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on a Fulbright Travel Grant for two years, and studied a further year at the Royal College of Art, London. From 1965 to 1966 she taught at the Pratt Graphic Art Center in New York.

After travel abroad, the artist returned to Japan for two years, before going back to the United States. There she worked as assistant to Fritz Eichenberg, and also taught at the Pratt Institute of Graphic Art in New York, as well as at the University of Rhode Island. From 1961 she lived permanently in the West, though she frequently revisited her home country, and from 1962 onward held solo exhibitions almost every year in North America, and occasionally in Europe and Japan. Currently she lives and works in Oakville, Canada. • Illustration — Woodblock print of the Boston Public Library by Matsubara Naoko. Naoko Matsubara's father was the chief priest of Kenkun Jinja, a Shinto shrine in Kyoto built in 1880 by Emperor Meiji to commemorate the general Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), the first military leader to attempt to unify Japan at the close of the Sengoku period; the shrine was initially sited on a slope called Funaokayama, for its shape, but was moved to the summit thirty years later. This connection explains the presence of shrines and temples in Matsubara's prints, which became one of the major recurring themes of her work. Shrines and temples became one of the major themes of Matsubara's works. Naoko Matsubara's style is influenced by her teacher Munakata Shiko (1903–1975), who worked in the mingei (folk art) tradition.

Unlike most Japanese artists who emigrated abroad, Matsubara decisively refused to internationalize her work, and her technique and style have remained close to what she developed as a young woman under the inspiration of Munakata, one of her teachers during her post-academic formative period. Through him she came into early contact not only with his other students but also with associates of the Banga-in, the school he had founded, where in 1963 she won the prestigious Kegon Prize at the annual group exhibition. In 1962, after she sent him some of her woodcuts for his assessment, Munakata wrote her a long letter praising her work, noting, among other things, how unusual it was for a woman in Japan to create work of such weight, mass and intensity; both artists always sought and admired a powerful, expressive art capable of instilling life from within the wood block itself, and Munakata was fascinated by the masterful use of the knife in her print A Big Tree.

Her first major series was Half Tame (1964), the first of many series and portfolios on Western and Asian literary themes, illustrating poems by Roger Shattuck, a professor of French literature whose essay on Proust won the National Book Award. In 1969 she made the illustrations for the German edition of the Japanese tale Taketori Monogatari, with translation and commentary by her sister, the novelist Hisako Matsubara. Among her early portfolios was an eleven-print set titled Solitude, published by Aquarius Press in 1971 and designed to accompany an essay drawn from Henry David Thoreau's Walden; every print in the portfolio was printed on hōsho paper made by Ichibei Iwano VIII (1901–1976). The design of Solitude shows a vigorous carving style, but the sharp angularity familiar from Munakata's influential works and from some of Matsubara's own early prints is softened here by the curvilinear motif of a willow, rendered in black, and its reflection in dark green, a treatment that can be read as an expansion of Munakata's style and of expressionist woodcut practice, filtered through her own vision and suited to a subject whose intent was clearly to express the stillness and reflection already central to Thoreau's essay.

Matsubara Naoko is recorded as having received Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

• "Images and biography" at Abbozzo Gallery web site • Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Duke University Press, 2015), p. 181. • Helen Merritt, Nanako Yamada: Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints. 1900–1975. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu HI 1995, p. 86 • Norman Tollman, Mary Tollman: Collecting Modern Japanese Prints: Then & Now. Tuttle Publishing, 2013, pp. 222-224