Chiura Obata

was a well-known Japanese American artist and popular art teacher. A self-described "roughneck", Obata went to the United States in 1903, at age 17. After initially working as an illustrator and commercial decorator, he had a successful career as a painter, following a 1927 summer spent in the Sierra Nevada, and was a faculty member in the Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1932 to 1954, interrupted by World War II, when he spent a year in an internment camp, where he acted as the founding director of the art school at the Topaz incarceration camp in 1942. He later emerged as a leading figure in the Northern California art scene and as an influential educator, teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, for nearly twenty years. He was the youngest of a very large family. At the age of five, he showed a natural inclination for drawing. He was then adopted by his older brother, Rokuichi, Shortly after he finished his apprenticeship, he received a prestigious art award in Tokyo. When he got to San Francisco, he found work as a domestic servant in a household, with the pay of $1.50 per week plus room and board. In 1909 he worked in the hops fields in the Sacramento Valley.

From 1915 to 1917 Obata was an illustrator and cover page designer for the magazine Japan, published for the Toyo Kisen Kaisha Steamship Co., during which time he turned out about 3000 illustrations and numerous cover designs. during the summer of 1927 on a sketching tour of Yosemite and the Sierra high country, producing over 100 new sketches and ink paintings in six weeks. The first exhibition Obata had for American audiences was in the following year, 1928.

Initial successes

In 1928, after his father's death, Obata returned to Japan. There, in 1930, The shop was shot at after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, and eventually the Obatas were forced to close it and cancel all classes.

Executive Order 9066 led to Obata organizing a large sale of his many paintings and woodblock prints. During his internment, Obata made about one hundred sketches, paintings, and prints, using whatever materials were available—even making relief prints on surplus linoleum. In 1954 he became a naturalized citizen.

Obata played a pivotal role in introducing Japanese art techniques and aesthetics to other artists in California. These techniques and aesthetics became one of the distinctive characteristics of the California Watercolor School.

After retirement

In 1954, Chiura and Haruko Obata led the first of the "Obata Tours" to Japan, to see Japanese gardens and Japanese art. He died in 1975, aged 89.

Posthumous exhibitions of Obata's works have been organized at the Oakland Museum, The Smithsonian Institution, and, in 2000, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, a retrospective of 100 ink and brush paintings, large scrolls and color woodblock prints. The museum collection at Yosemite National Park contains several Obata prints of the park. The Smithsonian American Art Museum organized an exhibition of Obata's Yosemite woodblock prints, which was shown at the American Art Museum in Washington, DC in early 2008 and then traveled to the Wichita Falls Museum, Wichita, TX (2008)

Personal life

In 1912, Obata married Haruko Kohashi (1892–1989). She was one of the first teachers of ikebana in the San Francisco Bay Area. She had an exhibition of her arrangements in 1913 at San Francisco's 75th Diamond Jubilee Celebration, and in 1915 she exhibited at the Panama Pacific Exposition, beginning a career as a teacher of that art. Their first child, a daughter, was named Fujiko. Their second child, a son, was named Kim; the third, also a son, was named Gyo. Their last was a daughter, Yuri. Haruko's last public demonstration was in Golden Gate Park when she was 93 years old.

Publications

Limited edition of 50. Color prints of paintings on silk, prepared for publication by the editorial staff of California Monthly

Yosemite Association (1993). Obata's Yosemite: The Art and Letters of Chiura Obata from His Trip to the High Sierra in 1927. Essays by Janice T. Driesbach and Susan Landauer. Yosemite Association, Yosemite National Park California. . Hill, Kimi Kodani ed. (2000). Topaz Moon: Chiura Obata's Art of the Internment. Heyday Books. Wang, ShiPu (2018). Chiura Obata: An American Modern. University of California Press. Scott, Donald M. The Life and Truth of George R. Stewart. (2012). McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina. . See Chapter 32, esp. PP 168–169.

Works online

(in approximate order of creation)