78 Artists Magazine May 2020
giving him the opportunity for a more concentrated study of
what he called dai-shizen or “Great Nature.” The tour was to
be a six-week trek across the California landscape, exploring
the High Sierra and Yosemite in a Model-T Ford. It would
prove a significant turning point for 42-year-old Obata.
“This event was the greatest harvest for my whole life
and future in painting,” Obata wrote in a letter to his wife
and family during the trip. In another passage, he recalls:
“This morning I woke up at 2 o’clock and I saw the moon
shining in the woods, on the river, and in the meadow. It
evoked in me the days of the gods.” The excursion offered
Obata access to the pristine beauty of the natural world.
Presumably it was also a relief to step back from the
inhospitable and sometimes violent culture found in San
Francisco and throughout California at the time. Anti-
immigrant sentiment was at a high. Those of Asian descent
had to take discrimination as a given and could find them-
selves attacked simply for walking down the street.
During the trip, Obata produced more than 100
sketches and ink paintings, which would provide the
foundation of the first major body of work he would
exhibit to an American audience. The media and tech-
niques varied: a mix of colored woodcuts, watercolors and
ink paintings in a bevy of styles, all extrapolating visuallyon the California landscape that Obata had connected to
on a deep level.
Notice Obata’s layering of serene, blue horizontal bands
in the colored woodcut Evening Glow at Mono Lake, From
Mono Mills (page 75). The application of paint is clean,
smooth and harmonious. The composition is a visual
essay of accord with and celebration of the natural world.
Likewise, the brushstrokes that comprise Mono Crater (page
76) are calm and unhurried, despite the jagged cliffs they
describe. Even in Life and Death, Porcupine Flat (page 77),
which shows bristly tree limbs and a tangle of denuded
branches in the foreground, all seems peaceful and at ease.
For playfulness and light, look no futher than Obata’s
Untitled (Bears), opposite, a 1930s ink painting describing
a gamboling mother bear and her cub with an economy of
fluid strokes.Executive Order 9066
In the years following his debut, Obata became fully
immersed in the California art scene. He showed his work
in several highly successful exhibitions and took a teaching
position with the art department at Berkeley. As a professor,
Obata was highly regarded; his granddaughter, Kimi KodaniGreat Nature, Storm on Mount Lyell
From Johnson Peak
1930; color woodcut on paper, 11x15¾
SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM, GIFT OF THE
OBATA FAMILY, 2000.76.8; © 1989, LILLIAN YURI KODANI