Born in Kyoto in 1937, the daughter of an eminent Shinto priest, Canadian Printmaker Naoko Matsubara began making woodblock prints in 1957 under the tutelage of designer Felice Rix. A member of the Viennese School of Applied Arts and wife of Japanese Architect Isaburo Ueno, Rix instilled in Matsubara an affinity for unconventional technique, a trait evident in works like “Peacock” (1962). The print’s vibrantly plumed bird was created by pressing ink-covered leaves to paper.
The 1960s: Fulbright at Carnegie Mellon University
Another vital period in Matsubara’s creative life came with her 1960 Fulbright Fellowship, which brought her to Carnegie Mellon. There, she earned an MFA in 1962. While in Pittsburgh, Matsubara documented Pennsylvania winters, Mount Washington precipices, and Westinghouse assembly lines with the same gravitas as iconic places of worship, like “Chartres” (1963) and “Kenkun Shrine” (1966).
By the mid-1960s, Matsubara worked as a studio assistant to German exile illustrator Fritz Eichenberg. Echoes of Eichenberg’s Expressionist style surface in works like “Nishiki Market” (1977) from Matsubara’s Kyoto series, where the predominant color is black, grocer signs are painstakingly incised, and receding perspective is expressed as a pile-up of vendor stands.
The 1970s and Early 1980s: Towards Abstraction
The 1970s and '80s were decades of further experimentation for Matsubara, who begins to gravitate towards solid color fields beneath complicated block prints. In “Rain” (1971), part of the Walden-based, Solitude series, a Kelly-green field with diagonal slashes indicating a downpour, underlies a large, heavily textured black frog. Matsubara revisits the design in 1987 with “Amagaeru”, this time focusing on bold color and abstract contour.
Mid-1980s: An Influential Voyage
A 1986 trip to Tibet transformed Matsubara’s perception of space and color. Her experience gave birth to the ten-year, 27-work Tibetan Sky series. “Ah, Tibet” and “Tibetan Sky, A” (1987) reveal a willingness to explore complex decorative pattern and unusual hue juxtapositions, like red and turquoise, ochre and navy, aqua and white. The series permanently unfetters color in Matsubara’s work.
Current Work: Formal Abstraction
While Matsubara’s most recent works appear entirely liberated from figurative obligations, they are not non-objective. Titles anchor the works to the representational world. “Summer Garden A” (2007) and “Summer Garden B” (2008) show Matsubara moving towards an aesthetic wedding of Matisse’s late-career paper collages and Barnett Newman’s laconic color field paintings.
Comprised of many smaller prints, moved in experimental patterns until larger harmonious assemblages of color and pattern form, the resulting works are enormous in scale, involve both print and collage techniques, and preclude mechanical replication--a fact indicated by the 1/1 run numbering at the lower left corner of each.
Throughout her career, Matsubara has steadily moved towards abstraction by reveling in the color fields and geometry produced through the traditional woodblock medium. Yet her work has never been entirely consumed by non-representational formalism. Her chosen titles reveal an adherence to the physical world. Still, Matsubara continues to experiment, pushing printmaking to new limits and defying the mechanical reproduction associated with the medium.
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