Tag Archives: miyoko ito

Celebrating the Genius of Miyoko Ito

Posted on by under Art, Life

I have mentioned the importance of Miyoko Ito many times before (here, here, and here), but there’s a little more to celebrate this Christmas day: I just received the new book Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts hot off the press.

Published by Pre-Echo Press, and featuring the research and writing of Jordan Stein, Heart of Hearts is the major publication that Miyoko Ito and her work deserve. Jordan Stein is an active and insightful curator who has developed a major presence nationally over the last decade. His research into and presentations on Ito are extremely significant, adding great depth to what is available on the artist.

Detail of Orange Cloud from 1977 by Miyoko Ito as shown in Heart of Hearts.

Loaded with chromatically accurate images, Heart of Hearts is the most complete compendium of Ito’s work available. Beyond this, the book provides a single place from which students and admirers of her painting can find all pertinent information about her life and process. Stein’s essay provides key context, deftly connecting Ito to not only her roots in the Chicago art scene but the broader aesthetic superstructure to which she belonged.

Detail of Susquehanna (The River) from 1959 by Miyoko Ito as shown in Heart of Hearts.

These two arenas – solid text and quality images – really set this publication apart. From the beautiful debossed cover (front AND back) to the matte surfaces of the large full color spreads, this book delivers. The sense of texture and painted action is wonderfully realized in these pages. I kept being surprised by the surfaces of the paintings coming to life. This is an ESSENTIAL book for anyone interested in mid-20th century painting generally, or Miyoko Ito in particular. To finally have one volume that really pulls it all together is just wonderful.

Front and back covers of Heart of Hearts.

This book is an appropriate celebration of Miyoko Ito as a person and as an artist. It includes nearly all of her work, some of which have been lost. While not technically a catalogue raisonne, it might be the next best thing, as it provides the most complete picture of her work that we’ve ever had. For this, we can thank Jordan Stein and Pre-Echo Press.

In my opinion Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts is the most important publication dealing with American painting since Yale’s four-volume catalogue raisonne of the work of Richard Diebenkorn. Go buy it.

Mark Staff Brandl Is On To Something

Posted on by under Life

I’ve been following Dr. Mark Staff Brandl for quite a while now. I particularly enjoy his Dr Great Art podcast, which has, of late, begun to feature some ideas from chapters of his forthcoming book (to be published by Bloomsbury).

Two current works in progress.

His most recent podcast episode, linked below, definitely intrigues me and syncs up with a lot of the ways I’ve been thinking over the last couple of decades. Specifically, my wheneverWHEN and An Ensign For Miyoko Ito works are borrowing significantly from the kinds of ideas Professor Brandl is elucidating. My 2019-2020 collaboration with Joel T. Dugan, Phoneme, also deals with some of this.

An Ensign For Miyoko Ito (#16). Ink on paper, 12×10 inches, 2018. Private collection.

This is how I talk about some of the motivational ideas for these series of works:

“…I seek out the compacted and the overdrawn; the enclosed and the layered; the transformed and the solidified. I look for shapes, colors, and spaces that go far beyond a simple tension between figuration and abstraction, trying instead to suggest a layered arena of observational and haptic information.

Miyoko Ito (Japanese-American, 1918-1983) – whose work has been a key influence on me over the last 20 years – was able to activate subtle surfaces with the illusion of space and an evocative sense of palpability. This is what I’m investigating: the experience of perception apart from particular, representational depiction. In my exploration, questions arise: Does flat form appear to move away from my angle of view? Will color resolve into both static surface and suggested movement? Can space and color align to reinforce both static structure and an expression of time? Might the poetics of silent, unmoving images actually produce phenomena akin to those found in dreams, memories, ecstatic sensations, and atemporal musings?”

Take a listen to the Dr Great Art podcast and see if maybe some of the things I’m saying resonate with how Dr. Brandl is thinking:

While there are many points Brandl brings up that are worth exploring (I greatly anticipate getting to read his book once it comes out), I find myself particularly drawn to the explications he makes regarding ambiguity and conceptual blending. In these areas he distills and clarifies a number of philosophers and intellectual traditions into something artists can really wrap their minds – and artworks – around.

WHENEVERwhen (Michigan), inks on paper, 10×7 inches, 2018. Collection of the Artist.

Beyond the artists he references in his text, I think that there are a few more that very strongly connect with Mark Staff Brandl’s ideas, particularly Marcelo Bonevardi, Nicholas Byrne, Diebenkorn, Vincent Fecteau, Magalie Guérin, Miyoko Ito, and Kyle Staver, among others.

It’s exciting for my own passion for these artists to dovetail with the serious scholarship that Dr. Brandl is bringing forward. I know that I’ll be incorporating concepts from his book into my teaching for years to come. I hope you’ll join me in listening to the podcast and exploring what these ideas can mean for making and experiencing artworks.

Miyoko Ito

Posted on by under Art, Life, Teaching, Writing

Miyoko Ito’s work has such intense gravity for me. In the midst of the high strangeness of our time I find solace in her works.

Six paintings are hung on white walls at eye level. The paintings contain muted and vibrant warm colors depicting abstract shapes.
Miyoko Ito: Heart of Hearts. Installation view, Artists Space, 2018. Photo: Daniel Peréz.


The only major professional goal I have left is to work on an exhibition or book about her work. It is a crime that we have dozens of books on the likes of Richter or Pollock but really only a single TINY volume on Ito – and it’s currently out of print.

Here is a review of the last major exhibition of her work: Light Effects: On Miyoko Ito’s Abstract Inventions, from The Paris Review, 2018. The most significant exhibition exploring Ito was mounted in 2012 at Veneklasen Werner in Berlin. Go here for a great selection of exhibition shots.

Miyoko Ito’s work hanging above the stairwell in the Roger Brown House, Chicago.

I first encountered Ito’s work in person at the Roger Brown House in Chicago in the fall of 1999. I spent a good deal of time roving around the Chicago area to see all the Ito’s that are available in and around the city.

One of my main teachers at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago was Barbara Rossi. Rossi is an incredibly influential artist and educator who knew Ito and impressed me with her own work and her knowledge of the contexts surrounding art making in Chicago.

In 2015 I got close to arranging an exhibition of Ito’s lithographs but could not secure proper funding and loans of works. I’ll try again sometime soon. In that process I began to correspond with Vera Klement, a contemporary of Ito and a paragon of Chicago art. Via email interviews I got some fun backstory on the life and times of Ito, Rossi, and Klement. I’d love to get the chance to explore these artists and their works again.

Gradient red and green, curved and cusped shades. A red pointed mound sits atop a pale green inverted triangle inside angular red and green rectangles.
Miyoko Ito, Island in the Sun, 1978. Oil on canvas, 38 x 33 inches.

Matt Ballou: RANGE – Reception at William Woods University

Posted on by under Art, Life, Teaching, Writing

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My exhibition – Matt Ballou: RANGE – is still up at William Woods University until December 16, 2012. I hope you can go see it if you haven’t yet. Below are some photos of the space, both after the installation and during the reception. I want to thank everyone who came out – friends, students (graduate and undergrad, current and former), and colleagues – and especially Jennifer Sain for her help in making the exhibition happen. Special thanks to Jane Mudd for encouraging William Woods to host this show.

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Installation, back on November 12, 2012.

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Three panoramas of the installed work.

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Two of my all-time favorite works… Locus #77 and #78

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Beautiful angles and shapes during the reception…

At the reception I gave a brief impromptu talk that led into some interesting questions from the audience and my own musing on the work.

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Me during my talk – Photo by Kevin Larson.

Click here to download the talk and Q+A session (42 MB MP3 format, 50 minutes long).

Some notes about the talk:

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Photo of me at the talk – Photo by Eric Norby.

What I’ve been musing on recently

Posted on by under Art, Life, news, Writing

I’ve been thinking about overtly shifting the direction of my work for a while now – perhaps a year. I don’t know that this shift would be easily discernible from the outside, but it represents a significant change of focus for me. As I look back over the last year of my practice and then cross-reference what I’m seeing there with some of the artists and artworks I’ve been looking at during that time, I can really see some connections forming.

For instance, check out these recent pieces:

The Teachers, Mandala for the Murky History of Beginnings and Endings #1, Portrait of Miranda at Thirteen Months, Two Bells, and The Seedbed #1.

Then compare their compositional formatting with aspects of the works of artists I’m looking at here:

Richard Diebenkorn, Miyoko Ito, Barry Le Va, Nicholas Byrne, David Rabinowitch, Julian Stanczak, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Marcelo Bonevardi, Frank Nitsche, Sharon Butler, and Vincent Fecteau.

It seems to me that my previous forays into more formal explorations – such as with the Locus Series (book here), and the conceptually interconnected Quintessence Series and Dodecahedron Series – are becoming more and more deeply apparent in my main body of work. In some ways I’m finding myself less drawn to the figure as a necessity and more drawn to the composition itself. I’m deeply interested in the perception of formal dynamics and the sense of haptic maneuvering that can take place within two-dimensional forces.

So it is that my recent miniseries, three of which are shown above in progress (9 inches in diameter, collage, gouache, acrylic and graphite on paper), have come about. They call back to previous works, such as this one from 2005, which was part of a side project I did while finishing up grad school (I needed a break from my thesis paintings):

First Bend, Oil on Canvas on Panel, 14 by 23 inches, 2005. Destroyed. Click to enlarge.

Anyway, who knows? We’re all moved and pressed and pushed, often by things we don’t entirely recognize. That’s why painting is so much more like getting lost in the woods than it is like jumping in a car and driving to the store for milk. It’s not meant to be that simple.

If it were that way there would be no discovery, no evocation beyond what we already know… and what good would that be?