... (concluded in this issue) ...
After enjoying that 'mini' exhibition in the small
'free space' at the end of the first year's work, I tried to make
subsequent exhibitions more interesting for the viewers too. Hamura
City has no galleries or display space for work like mine, but I
found a pleasant gallery in neighbouring Ome City, and rented it for
both the second and third exhibitions. I took along my tools and
woodblocks to give printing demonstrations, and also displayed
various photographs and other material to complement the prints. Each
time, the media was very helpful with press notices, and even though
the gallery was not convenient for people living in downtown Tokyo,
the crowds were good, and the subscriber list steadily grew.
During 1991 and 1992, there was a steady stream of
TV crews, newspaper reporters, and magazine photographers through my
workshop, and my scrapbooks grew quite fat with clippings. It seems
to me that I have the best possible situation here, enjoying the 'up
side' of media attention, and having none of the 'down side'. Someone
who is really quite famous loses all their privacy and can't even
walk down the street without drawing attention. Thankfully, I
certainly don't have that problem, and I'm sure I never will, but
have to admit that I get quite some personal pleasure from those
scrapbooks ...
It was in the fall of 1991, just at the time I had
completed the first quarter of the series, that the transition from
'English teacher/Printmaker' to just plain 'Printmaker' took place,
although not quite the way I had been planning it. Rather than stop
teaching because I had become able to depend on prints for our
income, I had to close our little school because when my wife left
for school in Canada, there was just no way I could possibly find
time for printmaking, class preparation and teaching, and properly
take care of our home and my two girls. Something had to give, and it
had to be the teaching. I had been doing it for five years, and it
was a big wrench to see it come to an end.
During those five years, I had met and come to
know well, dozens of people from my neighbourhood, from pre-schoolers
right up to grandmothers. Over the course of 2000+ lessons, I had
worked very hard trying to help them improve their ability to
communicate in English, and perhaps more importantly, to give them
exposure to a way of thinking considerably different from their own.
Some of them passed through my life with barely a ripple, but others
had quite an affect on me. I learned a great deal about this country
and its people during many long discussions sitting on the cushions
in our six-mat room. I know too, that the reverse is also true, and
that I made a considerable difference in the lives of not a few of
them. It was a very rewarding five years.
Although I certainly enjoyed the transition to a
life style in which my time was now completely under my own control,
finances became tight. I was constantly 'in the red', and as the
little bit of savings we had built up from English teaching gradually
trickled away month-by-month, I tried to find ways to expose my work
to more people. To this end, I decided to hold the January 1993
exhibition in downtown Tokyo. I was thinking of all those people
living in central Tokyo who would perhaps like to see my work, but
who found it just too far to travel to the Ome gallery where I had
previously exhibited. I calculated ... the gallery in
'out-of-the-way' Ome (at a cost of 10,000 yen per day), with 250
people visiting in the week, resulted in 9 people becoming
subscribers. Therefore, a gallery I had found in busy 'easy-to-reach'
Shinjuku (even though it cost 100,000 yen per day) should surely
bring in a somewhat larger number of visitors, and perhaps even
enough subscribers to remove some of the financial pressure
...
It was quite a toss-up for me, to consider
spending a fifth of the previous year's entire income on a short
six-day exhibition, but I took the plunge, and booked the space. All
together I spent just about a million yen, on the gallery rental,
photography, trucking, pamphlets, etc. And how did it turn out? Well,
by the end of the week, I had subscription orders from four people,
five less than the previous year out in Ome. Of course I was very,
very thankful for those four orders, as I'm sure you can believe, but
have to admit being very disappointed overall ... I guess that really
this kind of result is normal though, and the previous exhibitions,
held during the 'bubble' years, were the exceptions ...
* * *
I don't know if I'm crazy or not, but I've booked
the same gallery again for the next exhibition. I just can't see
'giving up' on Tokyo and heading back out to the local gallery. I
know that the general economic picture has not improved much during
the year, but if I simply turn tail and run away, then I know I'll
never get anywhere. I'm hoping that with the bit of extra interest
engendered by being 'halfway' through the 10-year project, there
should be enough visitors to make the event a success. Last year at
about this time, just before the exhibition, I was foolish and
overconfident. I thought that all my problems would be over. But I
learned my (painful) lesson, and this year my expectations are lower.
Maybe I'll be in the black, maybe in the red. But over and above
things like how much money I spend, how many people attend, or how
many people choose to become collectors of my work, there remains the
fact that there are going to be fifty prints hanging on the wall,
where five years ago there were none. Fifty prints! It's going to
feel pretty good to see them hanging up there. And whether many
people join, or nobody joins, it will still feel pretty good.
After the exhibition is over, I'll pack everything
up, come home, and get started on the second half of my journey. I
can't predict everything that's going to happen during the next five
years (I certainly couldn't have predicted much of what happened
during the first five!), but of one thing I am very sure. There will
be fifty more prints. Fifty prints that I hope will show at least as
much improvement in their making as the first fifty did. I'm still
just as enthusiastic and excited about this project now as I was in
early 1989, five very, very long years ago. One reason is the fairly
steady improvement in my skills. Another is the new things I am still
learning about this craft. The communication and feedback from
collectors is also obviously a very important part. But I guess
mostly it's just because my work is so rewarding.
I read a newspaper story a while ago that reviewed
a current movie which apparently deals with a group of men going
through some kind of personal 'changes'. They were getting fat. They
knew that "what they had" was "all they were ever going to get". They
were realizing that "from here on in, it's all going to be downhill"
... etc. etc. These men were in their mid-thirties. Just a few weeks
ago, I had my forty-second birthday. Although I'm not particularly
happy about that, I certainly don't think that I'm on the way
'downhill'. Now I don't think that I'm anything special, and I feel
like just a normal kind of person, but I'm dead sure that the point
of view of those men in the movie is not only wrong, it's perverse.
But it obviously reflects a very common view of human life, one in
which we start out as babies, and then soon become 'students'. After
we 'finish' studying we graduate into the world and become 'adults',
and 'get a job'. That seems to be the end of advancing, and after
some years of employment, we retire and then sit on our hands until
we die.
I refuse to believe this is an acceptable scheme
for life, but all around me I see young people accepting it without
question. For them the big questions are not, "What shall I make of
my life?", or "How can I best spend my time on this earth?", but
rather, "What school shall I try and enter?", or "What do I want to
be when I grow up?", as though this had to have a simple, single
answer. Of course, these young people are simply taking things as
they see them ... 'that's just the way things are'. But I would like
to think that we can structure our society in such a way that we all
spend less time as prisoners of our schools and jobs, marching in
lock-step together through life following the same route map. I have
a few ideas about how we might do this, and maybe in the newsletters
during the second half of my printmaking project, I might start to
widen my scope a little, and discuss some of them.
I guess I've wandered a bit off the track here at
my word processor tonight. I was supposed to finish off this little
article at the point where the next exhibition is coming up. The
preparation all done ... The P/R material sent ... Another million
yen has been committed ... Now just the waiting to see what happens.
Will it be a success? Will I lose my shirt (again)? Will I have to go
back to teaching English? Oohh ... the suspense ... (And just think -
I gave up being a 'happy salaryman' in Canada for this ...)