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September Issue |
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 llness in childhood and growing up close to the sea profoundly influenced the life direction of
Japanese artist Eizin Suzuki. Born in 1948 in Hakata City, he moved to a seaside city south of
Tokyo when he was ten. Suffering from asthma, as a child he could not participate in sports. But
he found another route to popularity. As he recalls in the Japanese television documentary on
him, Island Breeze: "Although I was not so fond of drawing, I was really good at it. I could copy
guns from the Western movies or characters from popular comics, and I drew them in front of
my classmates, who applauded me. Drawing became the means of communicating with friends."
He did not think seriously of art as a vocation, however, until he came across a book on
Surrealism when he was in high school, and this sent him into an exploration of modern art
movements and underground cinema. Upon graduation he determined to become a painter--but,
he recalls, "I had to earn a living. I could not live on painting modern pictures, so I did some
design work to earn money. I needed money to paint."
He was ambitious. "I wanted to become known to the world by painting. So I had to make my
works appeal to the world." Essential to this was cultivating a distinctive style. He searched for
his own mode of expression by following a process of elimination through a number of
techniques. "What was left," he says, "was just line and plane. There are not many artists who
use only line and plane. This would be one characteristic of my work." The other was a
recognizable theme. When he was thirty, he became attracted to the United States and a few
years later took a trip, during which he took hundreds of photographs as sources of inspiration.
He determined that "America would be the theme of my works because everybody adores
America."
Ultimately it was not through painting that Suzuki gained an international following but through
serigraphy and lithography. His works are distinctive not only for their use of line and plane, but
for their vivid color, used in a way that marries Western and Japanese sensibilities. His lengthy
process begins with a camera: Traveling around by car, he takes hundreds of photographs. Then,
back home, he selects the best images upon which to base his works. He projects a slide on a
large screen made of glass, to the back of which he has affixed a sheet of translucent paper, and
with a soft pencil meticulously traces outlines onto the paper demarking areas of color for the
final work. At this time he may eliminate details from the photograph, such as overhead wires or
people, that he deems unnecessary, and may add elements from other photographs. This process
may take three or four days.
He then transfers the outlines onto a sheet of Kent paper by rubbing the back of the translucent
page with a stylus along the pencil lines, and then he inks the lines with a graphic pen. In the
next phase, he or an assistant carefully cuts out pieces from sheets of colored transparent Pantone
film to conform to the outlines. He keeps a selection of about two hundred colors of Pantone to
choose from. The pieces he pastes to the Kent paper, using tweezers. The finished collagelike
picture, which may take a week to complete, is the original upon which his lithographs or
silkscreens are made, with the help of a printer colleague.
Suzuki still lives by the sea in his native Japan, and he travels the continental United States,
Hawaii, and Europe, camera in hand, in search of compelling images. Usually his works feature
water, boats, or gleaming cars, and reflections play an important part. Since his silkscreen debut
in 1980, Suzuki has made well over two thousand works. His limited edition prints are available
from Eizin Suzuki Editions in Amesbury, Massachusetts (978-388-5920), and more than one
hundred of his works may be viewed on the Web site www.eizinsuzuki.com.
----The Editor
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