Shinagawa Takumi

While Shinagawa worked in many medias, including metal (creating numerous mobiles and metal assemblages2) and photography, and preferred to be called a plastic artist ( 造形作家), he is best known for his prints. He created both mono-color and multi-color prints and his style gradually moved from representational to abstraction. His mid-career abstract work is likened to Onchi's abstract work with its simplification of forms. His later works are mainly silkscreens rather than woodblock prints. 

Examples of the Artist's Work - reference works, not part of this collection

Woodblock Prints

Silkscreen Prints

Metal Work

The Artist's Work - Comments by Oliver Statler

Source: Modern Japanese Prints: An Art Reborn, Oliver Statler, Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1956, p. 71-75.

Creating Works Unique to the Medium

Citing Picasso's use of "the unique qualities of the lithographic process to create something which could not have been done in any other medium," Shinagawa believed creative print artists should not attempt merely to reproduce images but to make individual and original woodblock prints of the highest quality, works that could not have been made in any other medium.

Connection to Ukiyo-e

Statler states that Shinagawa “is attempting to realize in the modern idiom the essence of traditional ukiyoe as a woodprint.  He is trying to give modern expression to what he considers the basic fundamentals of the woodprint, the qualities of line and color which are unique to the use of wood…”

The artist comments: “When I was beginning to make woodprints, I got hold of a fragment of ukiyoe. The more I studied it the more I was struck by the depth of color in that print. When I held it up against the light it looked like stained glass. I realized then that a good print is much more than color laid on paper. The paint has to go into the paper, to become part of the paper. Often the pigments should be mixed in the paper: by applying one over another to get a living, glowing color deep in the paper.”

Modern Japanese Prints

“Nobody in my house wears kimono,” he says. “It would be ridiculous for me to make pictures of kimonoed beauties. Japanese art can’t stay aloof from world currents, but that doesn’t make a Japanese artist any less Japanese. And I certainly don’t agree that, in becoming universal, Japanese art has been downgraded."

Technique

In his abstract prints Shinagawa has developed another way of creating a line. For example, he will print red on top of yellow. Where he has cut away the red block, a line of yellow remains.

“Let me explain it this way,” Shinagawa says. “If I draw or visualize a line on a block and then cut away the wood on both side to leave that line, I feel that I am merely reproducing a line I previously created. But if I take my chisel and gouge out the line, I feel that my hand and my mind are working together in an act of creation, the same way as a painter with a brush. It’s an entirely different kind of feeling, spontaneous and free.”

Like Onchi, Shinagawa has experimented widely with paper blocks, and many of his prints are made with paper blocks or a combination of wood and paper blocks. He is particularly interested in the textural effects he can obtain by making blocks from different papers. For example, a paper of uneven thickness will give a mottled effect. In printing from paper blocks Shinagawa usually fastens the blocks to a board and prints the same way he would from a wood block, using a kento [registration mark] on the board. If he wants a lighter effect he may lay the print on its back, place the paper block on top, and print with a thin paper between the block and his baren.

Shinagawa usually limits his editions to about twenty, but in printing from paper blocks he can make only four prints at a time because the blocks swell so rapidly and must be put away to dry before they can be used again. Of course the same problem is common to wood blocks but to a much lesser degree: a printer can get about two hundred impressions from sakura blocks before the swelling destroys the registry.

For his woodblocks he uses plywood, faced with shina for his shallow-cut monocolor prints and with rawan when he is cutting bold masses. 

He prints on torinoko paper. Often he gives it additional thickness by pasting a sheet of thin, tough tissue on the back. He sizes his own paper. 

Collections

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Los Angeles County Museum of Modern Art; Harvard Art Museum/Arthur M. Sackler Museum; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Carnegie Museum of Art; Art Institute of Chicago; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka; The British Museum; Brooklyn Museum; Oxford Museum, England.

Typical Signatures of the Artist

Prints in Collection

click on thumbnail for print details