Meet Cookie. He is a distinguished English bulldog. His long-suffering side-glance with accompanying raised eyebrow and cocked ear speaks volumes. Is he thinking, “Seriously, don’t ask me to do tricks! Just feed me and let me sleep!”? Or is he saying, “Don’t touch me, I’m independent.”? Everyone can hear their own version of Cookie’s story.
Hiroko Wada is a Japanese artist who began painting over 50 years ago, while still at high school. As a youngster, she liked drawing pictures of princesses and angels, illustrating fairy tales. Today she continues to tell stories through her art. She confesses to enjoy imagining the lives of random people she sees on the trains or walking past her on the streets. Her paintings are inspired by, “a scene in a movie, someone I met unexpectedly, a person’s hands or a memorable face.” She is a natural born storyteller.
In Japan, there are the terms “honne” and “tatemae” which translate to a person’s true feelings and thoughts and an outward persona that one presents to the rest of the world. Wada says that despite trying to hide one’s personal feelings, they often leak out in body language and especially through faces and hands. She studies emotions and feelings and uses them to infuse her work. “I feel things before I realize them…I get a little feeling between my brows!”
Her paintings of people throb with a heartbeat. There is always movement in her images, whether they are dynamic ballet dancers or a woman quietly sipping her morning coffee. There is living breath in her compositions, with her use of mixed media and collage, giving depth and texture. Even her buildings and street scenes pulse with life, while being very simply presented.
Wada is self-taught but she has studied art all her life. She started with oil paintings and Japanese calligraphy, but over the years has worked with pastels, charcoal, pigment, gouache and collage. In the 1980s, she moved to Paris for six years to study tempera and other painting techniques and materials. Everyone knows that the same ivory black shade of oil paint is so completely different to a pastel. “They both have such different characteristics despite being the same shade. When you rub pastels, it gives you a different feel or texture that you just don’t get with oil.” When she comes across new materials, she really likes to explore them thoroughly to make them truly her own.
Over the years she has diligently inspected other artists’ work with the dedication of a detective, identifying the components that determine a single stroke, what it represents and evokes. She also studies what determines that a painting is finished, keeping postcards of favorite artists and their famous works, to remind her when she should stop and acknowledge completion… a concept that many other artists find challenging!
Her study of life and its emotions is what permeates and defines her work, executed with an extensive exploration of paintings and its different media. She recounted having recently seen children at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) gathered around a sculpture of Constantin Brâncuşi, with their teacher. Having never been to a museum as a child, she was impressed that these children were able to experience art in person. Today she loves going to art museums. In New York, Edward Hopper’s iconic Early Sunday Morning is a favorite that she likes to see as often as possible and each time she sees it, she admits that it still moves her. Wada has the desire, that was perhaps shared by Hopper, to reduce a painting to a simpler form, presenting the spirit and soul of her subjects, rather than the busy minutiae of details. “I create through feeling.”
Hiroko Wada’s works are global —neither eastern nor western, spanning cultures and offering connection through the shared experience of enjoying art and evoking familiar feelings. “Paris in my 40s, New York in my 60s, I am lucky to have had the opportunity to work in each of these urban spaces. I want to continue working in a borderless field while relying on my intuition.” G&S
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