Hanging Nihonga in Tokyo
Allan West’s fascinating memoir of a life as a foreigner mastering Japan’s traditional art
What do you do if you’re a high school boy in Washington, D.C. who enjoys painting plants but finds it impossible to create fine lines with the stiff, viscous oil paints that come out of tubes? Who wants to create something permanent, but knows watercolors and dyes fade with time?
You research the history of art and realize Renaissance artists created an undercoat layer using glue made by boiling the protein out of rabbits, and made their own paints by mixing marble dust into linseed oil.
So you start making your own paints adding powered chemical pigments into the mix and end up with a smooth, matte finish. And then someone tells you artists in Japan had been doing something similar for over a century.
You have only one choice. You have to go to Japan.
This is how Allan West began his journey as a leading nihonga artist. He started by studying art at Carnegie Mellon, but at a time when most artists were focused on the abstract and shocking to achieve notoriety and fame, Allan remained wedded to concepts of beauty and permanence. He didn’t fit in. So he decided to take time off from school to teach English in Japan.
