Art, Interview & Stories with Mayumi Tsubokura

[cotw]

Check out November's monthly exhibit on COTW... This month is an art exhibit and interview with Japanese surf artist Mayumi Tsubokura, interspersed with photos from Myumi's personal archives tracking his encounters with many of surfing's icons/heroes, past and present! Mayumi has done it all and has many fascinating stories, check out the interview and enjoy the art and photos. Check it out...

www.clubofthewaves.com/art_exhibit_mayumi_tsubokura.php



Pic: Mayumi with Greg Noll

[Ron Croci]

Mayumi, I enjoyed your interview very much, However I would like to mention here your response to the question, Describe your art?
You say you paint whats in your mind, yes of course we all must do that. However, and especially because of your martial arts training, you must also know that the mind is filled with deciets, confusion, distorted morality, twisted points of view based on ones own sub consious desires as well as, degraded spiritual development.
Some masters have evolved beyond this. Still I wonder if you should not mix in more an understanding of keen observation, combined with a lot more drawing from life. From Life Mayumi, not from that dark place which is always battling to fool us. Only then is there a chance to raise the level of evolution in ones art. Every great artist is ALWAYS drawing from life, because there is more there than we can ever imagine.

[Akira Aubert]

Hello Ron, I’m Mayumi’s son. I’m happy to see that you enjoyed the interview. I should have checked the forum before.

I don’t understand why Mayumi, because of his martial art training would be considering the mind as a confusing force.
Mayumi thinks that everybody is free to make whatever he wants of his mind, ‘A man is not born a man, but becomes one’, we have to learn from our life to mold our mind. And his martial art training has nothing to do with this because it is a philosophical matter and not a spiritual one. One of the greatest martial arts master of our time, Bruce Lee, was an inspiring figure because he was capable of mixing everything, each subject, philosophy, art, physiology, spirituality, nourishing the other.
Martial arts training is not a matter of going beyond your mind, but rather a spirit of equilibrium: the Yin and Yang. Bruce Lee was an impressive modern master if you consider this point of view.

I don’t think that art appreciation is easy for an artist, I think that it is even counter-productive: an artist is using another language and must use his mind for his art.
And this dark place enables the artist to see the light I think.
One of my favorite French poet, Charles Baudelaire, has written les “Fleurs du mal”, Flower of evil, he shows how beauty can be even more blazing through the eye of a lost man.
Could Bach pick up from life his Well-tempered clavier without being deeply a lonely dreamer? Or Beethoven write his 9th Symphony, especially being deaf? Durer make his selfportrait “Portrait of the artist Holding a Thistle”? Géricault and his Radeau de la Méduse have nothing to do with the real raft. Even Michelangelo that you admire above all the others has painted God’s butt on the Sistine chapel! And what about abstract art?
So, do the great artists make their masterpieces from life or from their very own ideas? I think that the evolution comes from the disconnection. Everybody can enjoy life and know what it is, but you cannot tell the same thing from art. Art is talking the same language to the creators and the admirers: the language of beauty and intelligence. You have to struggle with your mind, work from the galactic size of everybody’s knowledge to produce one artistic piece. It can even be a torture... To reduce all what you know best to a single shot for a photographer for example, is the artistic challenge. And to truly appreciate art, you have to know these things. Thanks to the brain, he can help us with making dreams to summarize what we see and to tickle the mind to another state of consciousness. Beethoven’s motto was “Durch leiden freude”. One of my favorite quotation about art is Malraux’s “Art is a revolt against man’s fate”.

We agree on the idea of every artist is drawing from life, Mayumi’s paintings are made through his talkings with his friends and his feeling of the ocean.
But the darkside of surfing, death, is in each of his paintings as well. Death is part of life, and is a part of surfing too, I’ve not only met the riding giant Greg Noll as a child as you see in the above picture, I’ve also met another one, Mark Foo, so I know this well. Mayumi’s paintings and life are inhabited by these people.
To me my father is a sort of romantic painter. Maybe because romanticism has a lot to do with surfing, but I’m not sure, I can be wrong. I’m still learning from his work. This is another story. Thank you for your interest, I hope that you’ll have a chance to meet Mayumi and his work someday in order to complete your experience of my father’s art.