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Kunimi Terada: Musical Abstractions in Paint To say that the paintings of Kunimi Terada remind one of music is to explain some of their sensual appeal, but also describes their lyricism. Working in a completely free and abstract mode, Ms. Terada creates harmonious orchestrations of shapes and colors that seem to come together as unconsciously and as naturally as clouds, but which have a kind of order, almost austere, that is like musical composition. The language of pictorial creation has a more open-ended structure than music; still, there are laws that govern the harmony of the picture plane. We deal in verticals, horizontals, diagonals, divisions into halves, thirds, quarters; there is the general harmony of color, the balance of warm and cool. Kunimi Terada's canvases, varying in size from 12 X 12 inches to formats up to 48 x 48 inches, respect these eternal elements while subtlely subverting them into new patterns that seem at first to disobey formal laws entirely, gradually arriving in the mind as fresh and new-minted constellations of visual music. A color which appears to be a warm gray is permeated with echoes of blue breaking through from beneath like the sky behind a cloud; a turquoise mysteriously metamorphoses into a muted yellow, juxtaposed with a wedge of deep red beneath a horizon surmounted with purples, ochers, blues, violets and smoky, transparent glazes of gray over azure and crimson. Between all these drifting islands of color, black charcoal lines demarcate boundaries that dissolve as soon as they are set down. Nothing is fixed, nothing is permanent, everything is in dialogue, capable of shifting and re-forming into new and equally arbitrary patterns. The colloquy of all these shapes and colors forms a polyphony that brings a sense of joy and play, as well as an ethereal and otherworldly calm. These paintings are free creations in the best sense. In the small (24 X 24 inch) work titled Mirrored Movement (2003), the echoes of the drifting lines that float vertically across the canvas through fields of red and gray-green (though it's impossible to accurately name some of the subtle colors employed by Ms. Terada) are not so much repetitions as they are responses, or fragments of some larger form or shape that has been exploded and dissolved, leaving behind echoes of its contour amid glistening fields of pure color and scrubbed, almost calligraphic markings. The source of all these spontaneous eruptions of shape and color seem to be a deep intuitive imagination informed by a conscious enthusiasm for the work of certain abstract painters of the fifties and sixties, including Richard Diebenkorn, Lee Krasner, Graham Sutherland and the pervading influence of Matisse, whose sensibility also made a deep impress on Ms. Terada. She also admits to the influence of the work of her father, the eminent Japanese painter Takeo Terada, who during the thirties lived in the United States for a time, imbibing the influences of European modernism, wedding them to a figurative style that evinced a deeply abstract quality. But there is no overt remblance between her work and the various masters whose work she enjoys. Rather, she draws upon a feeling for abstract imagery that is entirely personal, resulting in images that are always a law unto themselves; there is no clear methodology or system employed here. The language of abstract pictorialism seems second nature to her, and each canvas arrives at its own order through a free play that begins with random elements that gradually give birth to a strange yet beautiful harmony of disparate ingredients. Colors are laid on in a flat manner, but the scumblings and transparent glazes which overlay them result in tonalities that evade definition. The richness and subtlety of her palette produces surprising combinations that are never discordant, despite the unexpected clash of intense colors amid the more muted pastel tones. Shapes of an irrational character take their place together, forming a balance that is asymmetrical yet inevitable. The often square format in which Ms. Terada liked to work seems exploded, breaking up into a more organic pattern. There are no rigid shapes or straight lines to be found here, only bending, swaying, sweeping contours that are as natural as the flow of water, yet architectonic at the same time. Finally it is her sense of design which makes these canvases, so unpredictable in their effect, cohere in a way that seems wholly natural and right, but the secret that animates each image and makes it speak eloquently remains private and personal, part of an expressive gift that finds beauty in forms, shapes and colors that are surprising and fresh, but which achieve that much-desired goal in art, and intimacy that is also universal.
Charles Coffman |
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