New Mexico - Abstract Prints

Edition of 15

Edition 2 of 3. Medium: Cut vinyl on paper

Edition 2 of 3. Medium: Cut vinyl on paper

Edition of 7

Edition of 7

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by artist Jeff Kahm exists in an edition of 40. Paper size is 25"h x 24"w with an image size of 20"h x 20"w. Jeff Kahm was born ...

This unframed, signed, limited edition series of 4 pigment print by world renown artist Robert Kelly exists in an edition of 50. Paper size is 24"h x 30"w with an image size of 14.5"...

Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw), Three Hearts, $1,200.00, Drypoint on paper, 2001, 16” x 23.5”, framed

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Robert Kelly exists in an edition of 30. Paper size is 35"h x 47"w with an image size of 26"h x 37"w. Rob...

Tableau, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, number Shinoda's works have been collected by public galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Metropolitan Museum (all in New York City), the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the British Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Singapore Art Museum, the National Museum of Singapore, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. New York Times Obituary, March 3, 2021 by Margalit Fox, Alex Traub contributed reporting. Toko Shinoda, one of the foremost Japanese artists of the 20th century, whose work married the ancient serenity of calligraphy with the modernist urgency of Abstract Expressionism, died on Monday at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 107. Her death was announced by her gallerist in the United States. A painter and printmaker, Ms. Shinoda attained international renown at midcentury and remained sought after by major museums and galleries worldwide for more than five decades. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Private collectors include the Japanese imperial family. Writing about a 1998 exhibition of Ms. Shinoda’s work at a London gallery, the British newspaper The Independent called it “elegant, minimal and very, very composed,” adding, “Her roots as a calligrapher are clear, as are her connections with American art of the 1950s, but she is quite obviously a major artist in her own right.” As a painter, Ms. Shinoda worked primarily in sumi ink, a solid form of ink, made from soot pressed into sticks, that has been used in Asia for centuries. Rubbed on a wet stone to release their pigment, the sticks yield a subtle ink that, because it is quickly imbibed by paper, is strikingly ephemeral. The sumi artist must make each brush stroke with all due deliberation, as the nature of the medium precludes the possibility of reworking even a single line. “The color of the ink which is produced by this method is a very delicate one,” Ms. Shinoda told The Business Times of Singapore in 2014. “It is thus necessary to finish one’s work very quickly. So the composition must be determined in my mind before I pick up the brush. Then, as they say, the painting just falls off the brush.” Ms. Shinoda painted almost entirely in gradations of black, with occasional sepias and filmy blues. The ink sticks she used had been made for the great sumi artists of the past, some as long as 500 years ago. Her line — fluid, elegant, impeccably placed — owed much to calligraphy. She had been rigorously trained in that discipline from the time she was a child, but she had begun to push against its confines when she was still very young. Deeply influenced by American Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, whose work she encountered when she lived in New York in the late 1950s, Ms. Shinoda shunned representation. “If I have a definite idea, why paint it?,” she asked in an interview with United Press International in 1980. “It’s already understood and accepted. A stand of bamboo is more beautiful than a painting could be. Mount Fuji is more striking than any possible imitation.” Spare and quietly powerful, making abundant use of white space, Ms. Shinoda’s paintings are done on traditional Chinese and Japanese papers, or on backgrounds of gold, silver or platinum leaf. Often asymmetrical, they can overlay a stark geometric shape with the barest calligraphic strokes. The combined effect appears to catch and hold something evanescent — “as elusive as the memory of a pleasant scent or the movement of wind,” as she said in a 1996 interview. Ms. Shinoda’s work also included lithographs; three-dimensional pieces of wood and other materials; and murals in public spaces, including a series made for the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo. The fifth of seven children of a prosperous family, Ms. Shinoda was born on March 28, 1913, in Dalian, in Manchuria, where her father, Raijiro, managed a tobacco plant. Her mother, Joko, was a homemaker. The family returned to Japan when she was a baby, settling in Gifu, midway between Kyoto and Tokyo. One of her father’s uncles, a sculptor and calligrapher, had been an official seal carver to the Meiji emperor. He conveyed his love of art and poetry to Toko’s father, who in turn passed it to Toko. “My upbringing was a very traditional one, with relatives living with my parents,” she said in the U.P.I. interview. “In a scholarly atmosphere, I grew up knowing I wanted to make these things, to be an artist.” She began studying calligraphy at 6, learning, hour by hour, impeccable mastery over line. But by the time she was a teenager, she had begun to seek an artistic outlet that she felt calligraphy, with its centuries-old conventions, could not afford. “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style,” Ms. Shinoda told Time magazine in 1983. “My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” Moving to Tokyo as a young adult, Ms. Shinoda became celebrated throughout Japan as one of the country’s finest living calligraphers, at the time a signal honor for a woman. She had her first solo show in 1940, at a Tokyo gallery. During World War II, when she forsook the city for the countryside near Mount Fuji, she earned her living as a calligrapher, but by the mid-1940s she had started experimenting with abstraction. In 1954 she began to achieve renown outside Japan with her inclusion in an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy at MoMA. In 1956, she traveled to New York. At the time, unmarried Japanese women could obtain only three-month visas for travel abroad, but through zealous renewals, Ms. Shinoda managed to remain for two years. She met many of the titans of Abstract Expressionism there, and she became captivated by their work. “When I was in New York in the ’50s, I was often included in activities with those artists, people like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Motherwell and so forth,” she said in a 1998 interview with The Business Times. “They were very generous people, and I was often invited to visit their studios, where we would share ideas and opinions on our work. It was a great experience being together with people who shared common feelings.” During this period, Ms. Shinoda’s work was sold in the United States by Betty Parsons, the New York dealer who represented Pollock, Rothko and many of their contemporaries. Returning to Japan, Ms. Shinoda began to fuse calligraphy and the Expressionist aesthetic in earnest. The result was, in the words of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1997, “an art of elegant simplicity and high drama.” Among Ms. Shinoda’s many honors, she was depicted, in 2016, on a Japanese postage stamp. She is the only Japanese artist to be so honored during her lifetime. No immediate family members survive. When she was quite young and determined to pursue a life making art, Ms. Shinoda made the decision to forgo the path that seemed foreordained for women of her generation. “I never married and have no children,” she told The Japan Times in 2017. “And I suppose that it sounds strange to think that my paintings are in place of them — of course they are not the same thing at all. But I do say, when paintings that I have made years ago are brought back into my consciousness, it seems like an old friend, or even a part of me, has come back to see me.” Works of a Woman's Hand Toko Shinoda bases new abstractions on ancient calligraphy Down a winding side street in the Aoyama district, western Tokyo. into a chunky white apartment building, then up in an elevator small enough to make a handful of Western passengers friends or enemies for life. At the end of a hall on the fourth floor, to the right, stands a plain brown door. To be admitted is to go through the looking glass. Sayonara today. Hello (Konichiwa) yesterday and tomorrow. Toko Shinoda, 70, lives and works here. She can be, when she chooses, on e of Japans foremost calligraphers, master of an intricate manner of writing that traces its lines back some 3,000 years to ancient China. She is also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting. She looks like someone too proper to chip a teacup, never mind revolutionize an old and hallowed art form She wears a blue and white kimono of her own design. Its patterns, she explains, are from Edo, meaning the period of the Tokugawa shoguns, before her city was renamed Tokyo in 1868. Her black hair is pulled back from her face, which is virtually free of lines and wrinkles. except for the gold-rimmed spectacles perched low on her nose (this visionary is apparently nearsighted). Shinoda could have stepped directly from a 19th century Meji print. Her surroundings convey a similar sense of old aesthetics, a retreat in the midst of a modern, frenetic city. The noise of the heavy traffic on a nearby elevated highway sounds at this height like distant surf. delicate bamboo shades filter the daylight. The color arrangement is restful: low ceilings of exposed wood, off-white walls, pastel rugs of blue, green and gray. It all feels so quintessentially Japanese that Shinoda’s opening remarks come as a surprise. She points out (through a translator) that she was not born in Japan at all but in Darien, Manchuria. Her father had been posted there to manage a tobacco company under the aegis of the occupying Japanese forces, which seized the region from Russia in 1905. She says,”People born in foreign places are very free in their thinking, not restricted” But since her family went back to Japan in 1915, when she was two, she could hardly remember much about a liberated childhood? She answers,”I think that if my mother had remained in Japan, she would have been an ordinary Japanese housewife. Going to Manchuria, she was able to assert her own personality, and that left its mark on me.” Evidently so. She wears her obi low on the hips, masculine style. The Porcelain aloofness she displays in photographs shatters in person. Her speech is forceful, her expression animated and her laugh both throaty and infectious. The hand she brings to her mouth to cover her amusement (a traditional female gesture of modesty) does not stand a chance. Her father also made a strong impression on the fifth of his seven children:”He came from a very old family, and he was quite strict in some ways and quite liberal in others.” He owned one of the first three bicycles ever imported to Japan and tinkered with it constantly He also decided that his little daughter would undergo rigorous training in a procrustean antiquity. “I was forced to study from age six on to learn calligraphy,” Shinoda says, The young girl dutifully memorized and copied the accepted models. In one sense, her father had pushed her in a promising direction, one of the few professional fields in Japan open to females. Included among the ancient terms that had evolved around calligraphy was onnade, or woman's writing. Heresy lay ahead. By the time she was 15, she had already been through nine years of intensive discipline, “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style. My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” She produces a brush and a piece of paper to demonstrate the nature of her rebellion. “This is kawa, the accepted calligraphic character for river,” she says, deftly sketching three short vertical strokes. “But I wanted to use more than three lines to show the force of the river.” Her brush flows across the white page, leaving a recognizable river behind, also flowing.” The simple kawa in the traditional language was not enough for me. I wanted to find a new symbol to express the word river.” Her conviction grew that ink could convey the ineffable, the feeling, "as she says, of wind blowing softly.” Another demonstration. She goes to the sliding wooden door of an anteroom and disappears in back of it; the only trace of her is a triangular swatch of the right sleeve of her kimono, which she has arranged for that purpose. A realization dawns. The task of this artist is to paint that three sided pattern so that the invisible woman attached to it will be manifest to all viewers. Gen, painted especially for TIME, shows Shinoda’s theory in practice. She calls the work “my conception of Japan in visual terms.” A dark swath at the left, punctuated by red, stands for history. In the center sits a Chinese character gen, which means in the present or actuality. A blank pattern at the right suggests an unknown future. Once out of school, Shinoda struck off on a path significantly at odds with her culture. She recognized marriage for what it could mean to her career (“a restriction”) and decided against it. There was a living to be earned by doing traditional calligraphy:she used her free time to paint her variations. In 1940 a Tokyo gallery exhibited her work. (Fourteen years would pass before she got a second show.)War came, and bad times for nearly everyone, including the aspiring artist , who retreated to a rural area near Mount Fuji and traded her kimonos for eggs. In 1954 Shinoda’s work was included in a group exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, she overcame bureaucratic obstacles to visit the U.S.. Unmarried Japanese women are allowed visas for only three months, patiently applying for two-month extensions, one at a time, Shinoda managed to travel the country for two years. She pulls out a scrapbook from this period. Leafing through it, she suddenly raises a hand and touches her cheek:”How young I looked!” An inspection is called for. The woman in the grainy, yellowing newspaper photograph could easily be the on e sitting in this room. Told this, she nods and smiles. No translation necessary. Her sojourn in the U.S. proved to be crucial in the recognition and development of Shinoda’s art. Celebrities such as actor Charles Laughton and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet bought her paintings and spread the good word. She also saw the works of the abstract expressionists, then the rage of the New York City art world, and realized that these Western artists, coming out of an utterly different tradition, were struggling toward the same goal that had obsessed her. Once she was back home, her work slowly made her famous. Although Shinoda has used many materials (fabric, stainless steel, ceramics, cement), brush and ink remain her principal means of expression. She had said, “As long as I am devoted to the creation of new forms, I can draw even with muddy water.” Fortunately, she does not have to. She points with evident pride to her ink stone, a velvety black slab of rock, with an indented basin, that is roughly a foot across and two feet long. It is more than 300 years old. Every working morning, Shinoda pours about a third of a pint of water into it, then selects an ink stick from her extensive collection, some dating back to China’s Ming dynasty. Pressing stick against stone, she begins rubbing. Slowly, the dried ink dissolves in the water and becomes ready for the brush. So two batches of sumi (India ink) are exactly alike; something old, something new. She uses color sparingly. Her clear preference is black and all its gradations. “In some paintings, sumi expresses blue better than blue.” It is time to go downstairs to the living quarters. A niece, divorced and her daughter,10,stay here with Shinoda; the artist who felt forced to renounce family and domesticity at the outset of her career seems welcome to it now. Sake is offered, poured into small cedar boxes and happily accepted. Hold carefully. Drink from a corner. Ambrosial. And just right for the surroundings and the hostess. A conservative renegade; a liberal traditionalist; a woman steeped in the male-dominated conventions that she consistently opposed. Her trail blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso’s. When she says goodbye, she bows. --by Paul Gray...

PENGUIN MIGRATION This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas of 'Penguin Migration', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a very afford...

STARAYA LADOGA FOG This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'Staraya Ladoga Fog', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a very afford...

AFTERNOON This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'Afternoon', by Vasily Golubev, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Golubev masterpiece at a very affordable price. Be...

This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'White Cloud of Apple Blossoms ', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a very affordable pri...

GREEN MEADOW AND FLOWERS This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'Green Meadow and Flowers', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a...

PORTRAIT OF AN OLD MAN This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'Portrait of an Old Man', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a ver...

MATING CALL This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas of 'Mating Call', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a very affordable price. ...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Ricardo Mazal exists in an edition of 30. Paper size is 35 inches h x 30 inches w with an image size of 26...

WOMAN IN A CHARIOT This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas of 'Woman in a Chariot', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a very affo...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print printed on natural cotton rag paper by world renown artist Robert Kelly exists in an edition of 30 that is available as a single ...

TANYA This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'Tanya', by Vasily Golubev, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Golubev masterpiece at a very affordable price. Produced t...

Growing Strong, by Melanie Yazzie, Native American, monotype, green, black, bird natural wood frame 27.25" x 35.25" paper size 20" x 28"

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Ricardo Mazal exists in an edition of 50. The paper size is 37 inches h x 35 inches w and an image size of...

Printed by Universal Limited Art Editions. Edition 65 of 100

BARKHANS This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'Barkhans', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a very affordable price. Beaut...

MILTON HEBALD (1917 - 2015) In 1994, at 77 years, Milton Hebald, one of the pre-eminent American figurative sculptors of the 20th centur...

Fantasy, Japanese, limited edition lithograph, black, white, red, signed, titled Shinoda's works have been collected by public galleries and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Brooklyn Museum and Metropolitan Museum (all in New York City), the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the British Museum in London, the Art Institute of Chicago, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Singapore Art Museum, the National Museum of Singapore, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Netherlands, the Albright–Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut. New York Times Obituary, March 3, 2021 by Margalit Fox, Alex Traub contributed reporting. Toko Shinoda, one of the foremost Japanese artists of the 20th century, whose work married the ancient serenity of calligraphy with the modernist urgency of Abstract Expressionism, died on Monday at a hospital in Tokyo. She was 107. Her death was announced by her gallerist in the United States. A painter and printmaker, Ms. Shinoda attained international renown at midcentury and remained sought after by major museums and galleries worldwide for more than five decades. Her work has been exhibited at, among other places, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the British Museum; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. Private collectors include the Japanese imperial family. Writing about a 1998 exhibition of Ms. Shinoda’s work at a London gallery, the British newspaper The Independent called it “elegant, minimal and very, very composed,” adding, “Her roots as a calligrapher are clear, as are her connections with American art of the 1950s, but she is quite obviously a major artist in her own right.” As a painter, Ms. Shinoda worked primarily in sumi ink, a solid form of ink, made from soot pressed into sticks, that has been used in Asia for centuries. Rubbed on a wet stone to release their pigment, the sticks yield a subtle ink that, because it is quickly imbibed by paper, is strikingly ephemeral. The sumi artist must make each brush stroke with all due deliberation, as the nature of the medium precludes the possibility of reworking even a single line. “The color of the ink which is produced by this method is a very delicate one,” Ms. Shinoda told The Business Times of Singapore in 2014. “It is thus necessary to finish one’s work very quickly. So the composition must be determined in my mind before I pick up the brush. Then, as they say, the painting just falls off the brush.” Ms. Shinoda painted almost entirely in gradations of black, with occasional sepias and filmy blues. The ink sticks she used had been made for the great sumi artists of the past, some as long as 500 years ago. Her line — fluid, elegant, impeccably placed — owed much to calligraphy. She had been rigorously trained in that discipline from the time she was a child, but she had begun to push against its confines when she was still very young. Deeply influenced by American Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, whose work she encountered when she lived in New York in the late 1950s, Ms. Shinoda shunned representation. “If I have a definite idea, why paint it?,” she asked in an interview with United Press International in 1980. “It’s already understood and accepted. A stand of bamboo is more beautiful than a painting could be. Mount Fuji is more striking than any possible imitation.” Spare and quietly powerful, making abundant use of white space, Ms. Shinoda’s paintings are done on traditional Chinese and Japanese papers, or on backgrounds of gold, silver or platinum leaf. Often asymmetrical, they can overlay a stark geometric shape with the barest calligraphic strokes. The combined effect appears to catch and hold something evanescent — “as elusive as the memory of a pleasant scent or the movement of wind,” as she said in a 1996 interview. Ms. Shinoda’s work also included lithographs; three-dimensional pieces of wood and other materials; and murals in public spaces, including a series made for the Zojoji Temple in Tokyo. The fifth of seven children of a prosperous family, Ms. Shinoda was born on March 28, 1913, in Dalian, in Manchuria, where her father, Raijiro, managed a tobacco plant. Her mother, Joko, was a homemaker. The family returned to Japan when she was a baby, settling in Gifu, midway between Kyoto and Tokyo. One of her father’s uncles, a sculptor and calligrapher, had been an official seal carver to the Meiji emperor. He conveyed his love of art and poetry to Toko’s father, who in turn passed it to Toko. “My upbringing was a very traditional one, with relatives living with my parents,” she said in the U.P.I. interview. “In a scholarly atmosphere, I grew up knowing I wanted to make these things, to be an artist.” She began studying calligraphy at 6, learning, hour by hour, impeccable mastery over line. But by the time she was a teenager, she had begun to seek an artistic outlet that she felt calligraphy, with its centuries-old conventions, could not afford. “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style,” Ms. Shinoda told Time magazine in 1983. “My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” Moving to Tokyo as a young adult, Ms. Shinoda became celebrated throughout Japan as one of the country’s finest living calligraphers, at the time a signal honor for a woman. She had her first solo show in 1940, at a Tokyo gallery. During World War II, when she forsook the city for the countryside near Mount Fuji, she earned her living as a calligrapher, but by the mid-1940s she had started experimenting with abstraction. In 1954 she began to achieve renown outside Japan with her inclusion in an exhibition of Japanese calligraphy at MoMA. In 1956, she traveled to New York. At the time, unmarried Japanese women could obtain only three-month visas for travel abroad, but through zealous renewals, Ms. Shinoda managed to remain for two years. She met many of the titans of Abstract Expressionism there, and she became captivated by their work. “When I was in New York in the ’50s, I was often included in activities with those artists, people like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Motherwell and so forth,” she said in a 1998 interview with The Business Times. “They were very generous people, and I was often invited to visit their studios, where we would share ideas and opinions on our work. It was a great experience being together with people who shared common feelings.” During this period, Ms. Shinoda’s work was sold in the United States by Betty Parsons, the New York dealer who represented Pollock, Rothko and many of their contemporaries. Returning to Japan, Ms. Shinoda began to fuse calligraphy and the Expressionist aesthetic in earnest. The result was, in the words of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland in 1997, “an art of elegant simplicity and high drama.” Among Ms. Shinoda’s many honors, she was depicted, in 2016, on a Japanese postage stamp. She is the only Japanese artist to be so honored during her lifetime. No immediate family members survive. When she was quite young and determined to pursue a life making art, Ms. Shinoda made the decision to forgo the path that seemed foreordained for women of her generation. “I never married and have no children,” she told The Japan Times in 2017. “And I suppose that it sounds strange to think that my paintings are in place of them — of course they are not the same thing at all. But I do say, when paintings that I have made years ago are brought back into my consciousness, it seems like an old friend, or even a part of me, has come back to see me.” Works of a Woman's Hand Toko Shinoda bases new abstractions on ancient calligraphy Down a winding side street in the Aoyama district, western Tokyo. into a chunky white apartment building, then up in an elevator small enough to make a handful of Western passengers friends or enemies for life. At the end of a hall on the fourth floor, to the right, stands a plain brown door. To be admitted is to go through the looking glass. Sayonara today. Hello (Konichiwa) yesterday and tomorrow. Toko Shinoda, 70, lives and works here. She can be, when she chooses, on e of Japans foremost calligraphers, master of an intricate manner of writing that traces its lines back some 3,000 years to ancient China. She is also an avant-garde artist of international renown, whose abstract paintings and lithographs rest in museums around the world. These diverse talents do not seem to belong in the same epoch. Yet they have somehow converged in this diminutive woman who appears in her tiny foyer, offering slippers and ritual bows of greeting. She looks like someone too proper to chip a teacup, never mind revolutionize an old and hallowed art form She wears a blue and white kimono of her own design. Its patterns, she explains, are from Edo, meaning the period of the Tokugawa shoguns, before her city was renamed Tokyo in 1868. Her black hair is pulled back from her face, which is virtually free of lines and wrinkles. except for the gold-rimmed spectacles perched low on her nose (this visionary is apparently nearsighted). Shinoda could have stepped directly from a 19th century Meji print. Her surroundings convey a similar sense of old aesthetics, a retreat in the midst of a modern, frenetic city. The noise of the heavy traffic on a nearby elevated highway sounds at this height like distant surf. delicate bamboo shades filter the daylight. The color arrangement is restful: low ceilings of exposed wood, off-white walls, pastel rugs of blue, green and gray. It all feels so quintessentially Japanese that Shinoda’s opening remarks come as a surprise. She points out (through a translator) that she was not born in Japan at all but in Darien, Manchuria. Her father had been posted there to manage a tobacco company under the aegis of the occupying Japanese forces, which seized the region from Russia in 1905. She says,”People born in foreign places are very free in their thinking, not restricted” But since her family went back to Japan in 1915, when she was two, she could hardly remember much about a liberated childhood? She answers,”I think that if my mother had remained in Japan, she would have been an ordinary Japanese housewife. Going to Manchuria, she was able to assert her own personality, and that left its mark on me.” Evidently so. She wears her obi low on the hips, masculine style. The Porcelain aloofness she displays in photographs shatters in person. Her speech is forceful, her expression animated and her laugh both throaty and infectious. The hand she brings to her mouth to cover her amusement (a traditional female gesture of modesty) does not stand a chance. Her father also made a strong impression on the fifth of his seven children:”He came from a very old family, and he was quite strict in some ways and quite liberal in others.” He owned one of the first three bicycles ever imported to Japan and tinkered with it constantly He also decided that his little daughter would undergo rigorous training in a procrustean antiquity. “I was forced to study from age six on to learn calligraphy,” Shinoda says, The young girl dutifully memorized and copied the accepted models. In one sense, her father had pushed her in a promising direction, one of the few professional fields in Japan open to females. Included among the ancient terms that had evolved around calligraphy was onnade, or woman's writing. Heresy lay ahead. By the time she was 15, she had already been through nine years of intensive discipline, “I got tired of it and decided to try my own style. My father always scolded me for being naughty and departing from the traditional way, but I had to do it.” She produces a brush and a piece of paper to demonstrate the nature of her rebellion. “This is kawa, the accepted calligraphic character for river,” she says, deftly sketching three short vertical strokes. “But I wanted to use more than three lines to show the force of the river.” Her brush flows across the white page, leaving a recognizable river behind, also flowing.” The simple kawa in the traditional language was not enough for me. I wanted to find a new symbol to express the word river.” Her conviction grew that ink could convey the ineffable, the feeling, "as she says, of wind blowing softly.” Another demonstration. She goes to the sliding wooden door of an anteroom and disappears in back of it; the only trace of her is a triangular swatch of the right sleeve of her kimono, which she has arranged for that purpose. A realization dawns. The task of this artist is to paint that three sided pattern so that the invisible woman attached to it will be manifest to all viewers. Gen, painted especially for TIME, shows Shinoda’s theory in practice. She calls the work “my conception of Japan in visual terms.” A dark swath at the left, punctuated by red, stands for history. In the center sits a Chinese character gen, which means in the present or actuality. A blank pattern at the right suggests an unknown future. Once out of school, Shinoda struck off on a path significantly at odds with her culture. She recognized marriage for what it could mean to her career (“a restriction”) and decided against it. There was a living to be earned by doing traditional calligraphy:she used her free time to paint her variations. In 1940 a Tokyo gallery exhibited her work. (Fourteen years would pass before she got a second show.)War came, and bad times for nearly everyone, including the aspiring artist , who retreated to a rural area near Mount Fuji and traded her kimonos for eggs. In 1954 Shinoda’s work was included in a group exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Two years later, she overcame bureaucratic obstacles to visit the U.S.. Unmarried Japanese women are allowed visas for only three months, patiently applying for two-month extensions, one at a time, Shinoda managed to travel the country for two years. She pulls out a scrapbook from this period. Leafing through it, she suddenly raises a hand and touches her cheek:”How young I looked!” An inspection is called for. The woman in the grainy, yellowing newspaper photograph could easily be the on e sitting in this room. Told this, she nods and smiles. No translation necessary. Her sojourn in the U.S. proved to be crucial in the recognition and development of Shinoda’s art. Celebrities such as actor Charles Laughton and John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet bought her paintings and spread the good word. She also saw the works of the abstract expressionists, then the rage of the New York City art world, and realized that these Western artists, coming out of an utterly different tradition, were struggling toward the same goal that had obsessed her. Once she was back home, her work slowly made her famous. Although Shinoda has used many materials (fabric, stainless steel, ceramics, cement), brush and ink remain her principal means of expression. She had said, “As long as I am devoted to the creation of new forms, I can draw even with muddy water.” Fortunately, she does not have to. She points with evident pride to her ink stone, a velvety black slab of rock, with an indented basin, that is roughly a foot across and two feet long. It is more than 300 years old. Every working morning, Shinoda pours about a third of a pint of water into it, then selects an ink stick from her extensive collection, some dating back to China’s Ming dynasty. Pressing stick against stone, she begins rubbing. Slowly, the dried ink dissolves in the water and becomes ready for the brush. So two batches of sumi (India ink) are exactly alike; something old, something new. She uses color sparingly. Her clear preference is black and all its gradations. “In some paintings, sumi expresses blue better than blue.” It is time to go downstairs to the living quarters. A niece, divorced and her daughter,10,stay here with Shinoda; the artist who felt forced to renounce family and domesticity at the outset of her career seems welcome to it now. Sake is offered, poured into small cedar boxes and happily accepted. Hold carefully. Drink from a corner. Ambrosial. And just right for the surroundings and the hostess. A conservative renegade; a liberal traditionalist; a woman steeped in the male-dominated conventions that she consistently opposed. Her trail blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso’s. When she says goodbye, she bows. --by Paul Gray...

This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, Theatre, by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a very affordable price. Produced to the ex...

Edition of 15

MILTON HEBALD (1917 - 2015) In 1994, at 77 years, Milton Hebald, one of the pre-eminent American figurative sculptors of the 20th centur...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Robert Kelly exists in an edition of 50. Paper size is 24"h x 30"w with an image size of 14.5"h x 19"w. R...

MILTON HEBALD (1917 - 2015) In 1994, at 77 years, Milton Hebald, one of the pre-eminent American figurative sculptors of the 20th centur...

MILTON HEBALD (1917 - 2015) In 1994, at 77 years, Milton Hebald, one of the pre-eminent American figurative sculptors of the 20th centur...

THEATRE This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'Theatre', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a very affordable price. Produce...

LILACS This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'Lilacs', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a very affordable price. Produced to the exact size of the original work and beautifully textured with a clear gesso finish following Chetkov’s distinctive brushwork, this reproduction was exclusively authorized by the artist and is currently available only on 1stDibs. "The 'anatomy' of the flower is too summary, melted in the flow of emotions. Yet this work could not be called non-objective, abstract. Their plastic masses are too full of life, too rich and juicy, too much of the earth." Dr. Alexander Borovsky, Chief Curator of Contemporary Art, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg From 1995 until 2014, when Russia invaded Crimea (at which time cultural exchange largely came to an end) the Pushkin Gallery...

This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'Before the Race', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a very affordable price. Produced to the exact size of the original work and beautifully textured with a clear gesso finish following Chetkov’s distinctive brushwork, this reproduction was exclusively authorized by the artist and is currently available only on 1stDibs. "The horse plays a prominent role in Chetkov’s oeuvre, symbolizing youth, freedom and the flight of time, always conveying a sense of energy and animation. He related closely with Kandinsky who famously noted, “Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposely, to cause vibrations to the soul." Theodora Clarke, Russian Art Scholar, Courtauld Institute of Art From 1995 until 2014 when Russia invaded Crimea, (at which time cultural exchange largely came to an end) the Pushkin Gallery...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by artist Brad Ellis exists in an edition of 30. Paper size is 46"h x 35"w with an image size of 40"h x 29"w. Brad Ellis is a Da...

STILL IFE WITH IRISES This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'Still Life with Irises', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chet...

MORNING This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas, 'Morning', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a Chetkov masterpiece at a very affordable price. Produced to the exact size of the original work and beautifully textured with a clear gesso finish following Chetkov’s distinctive brushwork, this reproduction was exclusively authorized by the artist and is currently available only on 1stDibs. "In the last years of his life, Chetkov conveyed through his paintings a certain clarity and vision, with his works evolving up to the very last day, as is evident in 'Morning', a musical explosion of color harmony, unbounded with light and brilliance and the hopeful expectations of a new day." From 1995 until 2014 when Russian invaded Crimea (at which time cultural exchange largely came to an end) the Pushkin Gallery...

Edition of 15

Night Chanters, black and white framed lithograph, kachina, limited edition 100 The Gallery Wall, Inc. now doing business as Glenn Green Galleri...

SUNFLOWERS IN A GLASS This hand crafted Giclee print on canvas of 'Sunflowers in a Glass', by Boris Chetkov, provides the opportunity to own and enjoy a...

"A Wall Won't Stop Us" is a monotype featuring reduction woodcut and silkscreened elements. The print belongs to a series that captures Simpsons' mos...

Untitled RTP is a 2009 lithograph by Guy Dill. Guy Dill beautifully captures the flowing motion of abstract objects in his prints, paintings, and sculpture. Untitled RTP is signed by...

Edition on hand is HC 2/3. Printed at Graphicstudio in Florida, this combination print by Richard Anuszkiewicz was printed with a set of two other editions in 1991. This work is comp...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Robert Kelly exists in an edition of 50. Paper size is 24"h x 30"w with an image size of 14.5"h x 19"w. R...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Robert Kelly exists in an edition of 30. Paper size is 35"h x 47"w with an image size of 26"h x 37"w. Rob...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by artist Jeff Kahm exists in an edition of 40. Paper size is 25"h x 24"w with an image size of 20"h x 20"w. Jeff Kahm was born in Edmonton Alberta, Canada in 1968 and attended the Institute of American Indian Arts...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by artist Gary Mankus exists in an edition of 40. Paper size is 37"h x 35"w with an image size of 27"h x 27"w. Gary Mankus was b...

Rippling, limited edition lithograph, Japanese, black, white, red, signed,number

Begin Flight, monotype by Melanie Yazzie, abstract, Navajo, Native American, art Melanie Yazzie works in a wide range of media that include printmaking, painting, sculpting, and cer...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by artist Jeff Kahm exists in an edition of 25. Paper size is 37"h x 35"w with an image size of 30"h x 30"w. Jeff Kahm was born in Edmonton Alberta, Canada in 1968 and attended the Institute of American Indian Arts...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Ricardo Mazal exists in an edition of 30. Paper size is 44 inches h x 60 inches w with an image size of 40...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Ricardo Mazal exists in an edition of 30. Paper size is 35 inches h x 47 inches w with an image size of 32 inches h x 44 inches w. Born in Mexico City in 1950, Ricardo Mazal moved to Barcelona Spain in 1986, and since 1990 has lived and worked in New York City, as well as Santa Fe New Mexico. Mazal’s work explores the process of visual perception as it takes form in the human consciousness. His paintings depict the passage of time, not by illustrating events but by leaving their residue to dissipate in space like a still photograph of a speeding object blurred to abstraction. In the last decade he has been honored with ten individual museum exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MARCO) in Monterrey. He has also shown at the Museo Nacional de Anthropologia, Mexico City and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. KORA follows the direction begun by La Tumba de La Reina Roja (The tomb of the Red Queen...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Ricardo Mazal exists in an edition of 30. Paper size is 35 inches h x 30 inches w with an image size of 26 inches h x 27 inches w. Born in Mexico City in 1950, Ricardo Mazal moved to Barcelona Spain in 1986, and since 1990 has lived and worked in New York City, as well as Santa Fe New Mexico. Mazal’s work explores the process of visual perception as it takes form in the human consciousness. His paintings depict the passage of time, not by illustrating events but by leaving their residue to dissipate in space like a still photograph of a speeding object blurred to abstraction. In the last decade he has been honored with ten individual museum exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MARCO) in Monterrey. He has also shown at the Museo Nacional de Anthropologia, Mexico City and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art. KORA follows the direction begun by La Tumba de La Reina Roja (The tomb of the Red Queen...

This unframed, signed, limited edition pigment print by world renown artist Robert Kelly exists in an edition of 50. Paper size is 24"h x 30"w with an image size of 14.5"h x 19"w. R...

Edition of 80

Layering fabrics, dyes, pigments, crystals, and various other natural materials, Martha Tuttle is a master of juxtaposing textures to explore the relationship between humans and the physical world. Her unique artworks draw upon a variety of mediums to create harmonious compositions vibrating with her artistic energy. Tuttle’s new triptych of prints — "The Colors of a Cholla Cactus...