The Art of Collaboration
The Art of Collaboration . . . For details of the Art of Collaboration scheduled in Tokyo for Sunday March 3rd see: https://www.facebook.com/events/159716720847781/ His question hit me between the eyes. My husband Aki looked up from his manuscript, papers spread all over the dining room table. We were picking apart his book sentence by sentence. […]
Genesis Art Workshops travel to Tsunami-hit Oshiki
A proposal to offer a Genesis collage workshop in one of the hardhit tsunami-destroyed towns in Miyage prefecture (Oshiki) has been accepted! The theme will be Spring Seeds–creating collage with fine washi papers as a way of generating hope. Looking forward to seeing what these mostly old people, along with some families and children ‘grow’. […]
The Art of Taking a Weekly Rest
I’ve begun celebrating the Sabbath here in Tokyo as a complete day of rest. No television. No phone calls. No computers, no Kindle or iphones or text messages. And if I forego Facebook my son is ready to forego his computer games too. And my daughter doesn’t turn on the stereo. And my husband too. […]
Inner Peace
What is the world coming to? Lego Corporation has jumped on the card-production band wagon and created its own ‘spiritual’ line of cards. They arrived in the Ninja Lego kit that my 10 year old Seiji just received as a gift. Ironically, Seiji has just renounced Battle Spirit cards. This was an expensive hobby that […]
The Money Crunch
I’m writing this post in response to reading a post by a writer who is deeply upset that she can no longer pay the rent by writing. Who ever told us that we had to make our money through just writing? Who is it that demands us artists to pay the bills from our art? […]
Signposts on the Journey of Life
The art on this Lesley College application form stunned me — as I opened up this page just hours after Shoko Yatabe painted this beautiful oil at Genesis art studio yesterday, December 5th. Life is a road with signboards telling us to stop, to go, to pay attention. These signboards that especially appear through art […]
When the Drums Beat On
During a peaceful day of painting with Shoko Yatabe, we were so focused on making these abstract mandalalike patterns that it never occurred to us to think of drums. But life is so much about connecting the dots. In this case, downloading the oil painting photos onto the computer along with a photo of Seiji’s […]
Montana’s Way of Drumming
Montana King Ramsey–my son’s drumming teacher here in Tokyo, was telling us today how he taught himself the drums. He was playing bongos in Philadelphia in the studio with some really great musicians. He watched them really closely from his stool by the bongo. He watched and listened, and followed those drum sticks until he […]
The front and the back of the creative process
In front of our eyes the world stretches out as much as we allow it in. When we are leading myopic lives, attached to our smart phones, our ipads, our computers, our digital cameras, what we see is a composed moment in time, cut, edited, photoshopped, perfected, then reduced to a flash or a second […]
The First Human Genesis Cards
Meet Melisa Eugenio, the first human Genesis Card. Melisa and I go back to 1994, when we both were teaching at Gakushuin, the elite high school attended by the likes of the Imperial family and where we both decided from day one that we had to play the part, wear nice clothes, buy a new […]