Existing comment:
Obata's Yosemite:
Chiura Obata interprets views of the High Sierras and Yosemite National Park with a distinctive Japanese aesthetic. He received his early training in sumi-ink painting in Japan, where he was born. After he immigrated to San Francisco in 1903, at age eighteen, he began to integrate Western methods of perspective into his work.
Obata visited Yosemite National Park and the surrounding area in 1927 to make watercolor paintings. Since the first American artists visited the region in the mid-1800s, moist depicted majestic views of the major sites. Obata usually painted more intimate scenes. He returned to Japan a year later to translate about a third of his more than one hundred watercolors of Yosemite into woodcuts in the traditional Japanese manner.
Obata died in California in 1975, The watercolors, woodcuts, and working proofs in this exhibition were donated to the Smithsonian American Art Museum by the Obata family. All the quotes are Obata''s observations and thoughts, gathered from his postcards, letters, and diaries. |