Growing up in Ithaca, NY, and then Kyoto, Japan, I wasn’t exposed much to western painting beyond the Van Goghs in textbooks. Joan Mitchell’s work seeped into my consciousness bit by bit. I would have first come across it in the early 2000s, many years after moving to New York, but it’s only now in mid-life that I can really start to see her work—in person, whenever possible—and fully take it in, the power and confidence of it, with my full attention, artist to artist.
I have a funny relationship with painting, where some deep part of me feels I don’t “get” to do it; the DNA of my craftspeople background whispers that painting is for a different class of people. So I have a tendency to hold painting—art for art’s sake—at arm’s length. Receiving the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant was life changing, to feel that the narrative I had internalized was not in fact set in stone. The grant began a direct connection to Joan Mitchell the person, not just this distanced Painter who occupied hallowed ground. I picture her sometimes, cigarette in hand, in the corner of my studio, telling me to get on with it and just make the work.
Read more at joanmitchellfoundation.org.
