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Once we got ourselves
set-up and running in Tokyo that fall, with the
English classes running three (later four) days a
week, I started to get serious about designing and
making some prints.
Over the next couple of months, I spent a lot of
time at the studio/workshop of the Yoshida family,
at that time being run by Toshi Yoshida. It wasn't
an actual 'school', but just a sort of 'open
workshop' space where each student had a table and
worked away on his own projects in his own time.
There would be occasional tutorials given by either
Tsukasa-san, Toshi's son, or by Komatsu-san, the
main printer who worked for the Yoshida family.
I got plenty of good advice during this time,
but stopped going for a couple of reasons. One was
that our money was very very tight indeed - it was
taking time for the enrollment in our English
conversation school to build up to a livable level,
and I simply couldn't afford the studio fees and
the very expensive train fares to get to Yoshida's
place. But another was that I had been greatly
disappointed to find that there was nobody there
who could carve - all the Yoshida prints
were made with photographically reproduced key
blocks; only the colour blocks were carved, and
even these were done on plywood.
From my point of view, this wasn't 'real'
printmaking at all, and by the end of November I
had stopped going to the studio. In retrospect,
this was a mistake, because I could have learned a
great deal from Komatsu-san, and I would have saved
myself years of struggling with printing if I had
been a bit more reasonable in my desires.
I made two prints during the time I worked
there:
(click image for a larger
version in a 'popup' window)
They were both originals (maybe with no
quotation marks this time ...) I sketched my wife's
arm, and then put it together with a few tea
ceremony utensils ... It's very much overdone, with
mica on the background, and gold powder on the bit
of sash that shows. And that ridiculous tree just
'glued' onto the sleeve, where no self-respecting
kimono designer would ever put it ...
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