Nature's patterns serve as perspective, inward muse
By David C. Farmer
Special to The Advertiser
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Mary Mitsuda's recent paintings continue her investigation into nature, with their enigmatic landscape references, dripped lines, and transparent and translucent veils of color.
On view are pieces from the most recent of three continuing series: "Falling Flowers," "Veils" and "Views (Landscape Comix)."
"We look out at nature in order to also gaze inward," Mitsuda explains. "Daydreaming, we create an internal landscape with its own water, flowers and sky. Things are hidden, things are revealed and then everything changes."
Her work reflects a meditation on change and perspective, the natural cycle between movement and stillness. The overall visual texture of her acrylic paintings is formed by layered horizontal and vertical stripes, drips and bands, suggesting stacked horizons, tapestries, trees, water, sky, maps and perhaps the human form.
Mitsuda is interested in the passage of time and our connection to nature, the patterns that emerge during the painting process through the use of various gestures, colors and textures.
Though she builds spatial qualities of the paintings to reflect her vision of the world's natural order, she also contrasts this illusory space with the flatness of the picture plane, generally by using contrasting vertical drips as the painting's final punctuation.
The artist, who was born in Honolulu in 1949 and received her bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, certainly sets an aspiring agenda for herself.
Some of the series, especially the "View" series, work better than others in terms of the painterly idiom suggesting the natural forces she aspires to evoke.
Where the work has less gestural power or looks overworked and covered — as in most of the "Veils" pieces — the results are less satisfactory.
Situated as a bottom lobby to the Hawai'i Pacific University theater upstairs, the gallery provides theatergoers as well as the campus community and gallery-goers a fine opportunity to see the work of local artists in a breathtaking setting of the majestic Ko'olau mountains.
