Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered,” the Scottish mountaineer and poet Nan Shepherd wrote in her breathtaking love letter to the mountain. Around the same time, across an ocean and a landmass, another poet laureate of place was serenading nature in a different medium and with a singular voice.
Called to art since childhood, Chiura Obata (November 18, 1885–October 6, 1975) was trained in the traditional Japanese ink and brush painting technique sumi-e from the age of seven. When his family readied him for military school at age fourteen, he ran away, left his home prefecture, and traveled four hundred miles north to Tokyo, where he apprenticed himself to a prominent painter for three years. Shortly before his eighteen birthday, Obata left for the United States and settled in San Francisco, working as a domestic servant while pursuing an arts education. He was soon supporting himself with illustration work for Japanese-language magazines and newspapers. But the American Dream was not on offer — instead, Obata was met with the era’s prevalent racial animosity toward Japanese immigrants, who were socially ostracized, denied entry into restaurants, hotels, and entertainment establishments, and legally prohibited from owning land.
Perhaps it was this anguishing disappointment with the human world, with its seething cauldron of xenophobia and racism, that made Obata turn his heart and his paintbrush to the natural world. On his first trip to the High Sierra in 1927, watching “beautiful flowers bloom in a stream of icy water,” Obata wrote to his wife, Haruko:
I only feel full of gratitude.
He spent much of the 1920s traveling, capturing California’s tessellated natural beauty — from its bays and beaches to its mountains and redwood forests. In his exquisite watercolors and woodblock prints, Obata deliberately employed a combination of traditional Japanese techniques rather than abiding by any one school.
By the end of the decade, his paintings had garnered considerable attention. In 1928, Obata received his first one-person show in America at a fine arts gallery in San Francisco — a small selection drawn from the ten thousand paintings he had painted over the previous twenty years. The exhibition catapulted Obata into a new stratum of recognition and established him as a central figure in the newborn California Watercolor School, which would go on to shape the sensibility of twentieth-century American art.
But neither Obata’s stature in the creative world nor his appointment as an art instructor at U.C. Berkeley protected him from the swarming hostility of the country he had made his home and the recipient of his rare gift. In December of 1941, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, locals fired shots at the art supply store Obata and his wife owned in Berkeley. After continued harassment and threats, the Obatas closed the store and cancelled the popular art classes they had been hosting for the community. By the spring, Obata was detained at one of California’s internment camps for Japanese Americans, where he founded an art school using his own funds and donations…
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