2003: Ogawatei

December 27, 2003
North Georgia Mountains

The day is bright and sunny with a clear blue sky above the distant tree line that is a tangle of browns and grays. The trunks of mature trees closer to the window snake and bend in every direction, while some of those in their youth shoot as perfect verticals to the sky above. The leaf-strewn ground, covered with a textured carpet of browns cut with dark horizontal shadows of the trunks created by the strong morning sun, rises sharply from the windows to the top of a nearby ridge, then falls away to the valley with a stream beyond. Gray squirrels scamper up the trunk of a fallen tree, the lone chipmunk scoots about on the ground with a short rest on a large stone before he disappears down his hole. Titmice, black capped chickadees and white-breasted nuthatches dart into the feeder and flit quickly away to crack the shell of a seed and enjoy the morsel within. And there are the blackest of crows, always in a raucous flock that must be content with the seeds knocked to the ground below by the smaller birds. Their territory is scraped clean of leaves as they scramble for these humble leftovers.

This inspiring scene, painted in nature’s winter neutrals, is viewed through a grid on a grand scale. Picture a window wall 18′ wide and 18′ high with three large windows plus a comparable glass door topped by a triangle with four additional windows peaking to the roof. This view is from the great room of my newly acquired retreat in the North Georgia Mountains, two hours northwest of Athens. Ogawatei (Japanese for “the retreat by the stream”) is the new love of my life! I never realized what it is like to live in a house that puts one in visual touch with nature from the inside — and all seen through a grid that has been the essence of my creative life for all of the Japan years. I am living in my concept! This house is as much (or more) about the outside than it is about the inside — a whole new experience for a young person of my advanced age.

A place in the mountains close to Athens is not an idea just newly realized. I am in the community of Big Canoe, a gated enclave with numerous amenities (golf, fishing, boating, swimming, etc.) and a strict architectural code that controls not only the design of the houses, but also the materials used (wood, stone and glass) and the color of the exteriors (neutrals of nature). As a committed non-golfer, the amenities had minimal influence on the choice of B C. The atmosphere created by the woods, streams (yes, I have one on each side of the house), hiking trails and mountain views with the several lakes beckoned me time after time. Finally, in April my realtor showed me this house along with several others that had long mountain views to Atlanta some 50 miles away (not from inside the house but from fine weather decks).

This house has a great room for living and dining with an open kitchen opposite the window wall, a stacked stone fireplace on one exterior wall (stacked stone utilizes rather thin flat stone and is laid up with no visible mortar), master bedroom/bath with a window-grid view of the same woods, two additional bedrooms with bath, garage, AND a huge studio on the terrace level with a separate storage room. The studio was the clincher. One stream, fifteen feet from the house, babbles, bobbles, and cascades down a series of rock mini falls with sounds that make you weep with joy or lull you to sleep during fair weather, when the windows are open. Friends have recently helped clean the stream of leaves and other debris, filled in low mucky spots, and lined much of both banks with the numerous stones that are nature-strewn about the woods. This is a ‘work in process’ — a kind of site-specific work that joins the pyramid of dead vertical logs that is forming a giant cone/teepee frame in the woods a hundred feet from the house. The smaller stream, on the other side of the house, is formed by several springs on the property.

And to those who may wonder — NO, I am not giving up my mortgage-free and belonging-laden Athens house or my rental house in Kyoto. This mature single really does need three separate abodes to satisfy his insatiable need for excitement, inspiration, serenity, and change.

As for the rest of the year and this peripatetic life: January found me, once again, on a glorious visit with my cousin Gloria in Tucson. This is a very healthy annual habit that renews our mutual admiration and allows me to sate myself on the fantastic landscape that is Southern Arizona. This was also the start of my weekly trips to Atlanta to cheer on my grandson Lee’s basketball team and to cheer, once again, the Georgia Gym Dawgs. No championships this year but an exciting season, none-the-less. February kept me busy teaching my usual schedule at UGA (yes, I’m still hanging in there until the State of Georgia’s coffers are once again ample enough to assure hiring a replacement) and preparing for the fifth Study Abroad Program in Kyoto.

In March I made the first of my four trips to Kyoto to renew myself with that essential medicine that is the atmosphere and essence of that ‘second’ city in my life, to make final on-site arrangements for the Study Program and begin to organize studio life for my solo show in July.

April brought Lee’s baseball games where he did well with pitching and out fielding. It was also the month I discovered my true love in the Georgia Mountains and signed the contract on Ogawatei.

May 11 was the departure date for the four-week Study Program in Kyoto with a group of 13 students divided between fabrics and ceramics. It was the second year for the ceramics classes in nearby Shigaraki directed by my colleague from UGA, Isabell Daniel. It was a very successful year with a group of enthusiastic young students who worked very hard and enjoyed themselves in a wide range of activities. In my spare time, which was minimal, I whipped my garden back into shape, spent some time with friends and organized studio and materials for the work ahead when I would return for six weeks at the end of June.

While home in June, after the Program, I closed on the house, moved furniture into the garage with dedicated helpers, slept here one night and headed back to Kyoto. Today, late in December, sunlight floods the great room, facing WNW. In the season of leaves there is ample shade. With an outside temperature near 60° it is an ideal time to work in the stream for a couple of hours. Two hours later I am settled back in at my laptop after a healthy bit of exercise. I was totally immersed in studio work to prepare for my solo show opening the end of July at GalleryGallery in Kyoto. The title was “Maku: Walls of Celebration” inspired by Japanese maku, walls of striped fabric used outdoors for centuries to mark special places and events: festivals, street stalls, religious celebrations, outdoor performances, special sales events, to name a few. I used this concept for two large cube-enclosures in my retrospective exhibition of the ‘Japan years’ in Atlanta in 2002. This time, however, “Maku: Walls of Celebration” utilized three-dimensional space to create a single “wall” where viewers and performer were able to move among the free hanging colored panels of kimono fabric collected over a period of years with some of them dyed to my specifications. The combination of colors was changed on a daily basis for the two weeks of the exhibition, to celebrate many different themes: i.e. The Spirit of Japan, Nightingale in the Bamboo Forest, Plum Blossoms in the Snow, Waves at the Seashore, etc. Recordings of sounds from nature or ‘mood’ music played softly in the background. The back window wall was covered with a solid panel of white fabric that served as a filter for light coming through the windows and a background for the colored panels that were hung in two planes, each hung 30″ apart. Part of the gallery space, separated from the exhibition, served as an open studio where I stored the unused panels while I continued daily work on hand finishing the individual panels. At the end of each day, I changed the colors for the next day’s viewing.

A Kyoto friend of long standing introduced me to a Butoh dancer, Ima Tenko, who agreed to a collaboration of her style of dance within a delicate plum blossom pink and white ‘wall’. She came to look at the arrangement, made a few suggestions, walked among the panels for 15 minutes, thanked me and was on her way. The evening of the reception and performance, Ima-san wore a sheer white kimono, backwards, and a white thong. She did an improvisational 30-minute performance within and, and occasionally outside the exhibition space, interacting with the fabric panels and some small pieces that were left over from the panel cutting. It was a very moving experience. The moods expressed ranged from joy to anger, quiet and demure one minute to stomping bombast the next. Friends and strangers in the audience, crowded into a small reception space outside the gallery proper, viewed this event through a standard doorway — a narrow window on lma-san’s world. All were enthusiastic in their response to the collaboration.

Soon after the closing of the show, I packed myself up and headed back to Athens to begin the Fall Semester at UGA the middle of August. Shortly after my return, a recently graduated Japanese MFA student who came for six months to study English joined me. Kenichi is a wiz at all sorts of tasks and repair work. He was my studio assistant in Kyoto the previous two years, and I made full use of his talents in Kyoto, Athens and at Big Canoe. We were not able to visit here until the Labor Day weekend but worked like two demons possessed. The house shaped up beautifully in a month of weekends. It has become like a drug for me — on a high when I am here and in withdrawal when I am not. Missing a weekend in the woods is a near crisis in my life.

I made my final visit to my beloved and aged rental house in Kyoto the end of October for a brief week to renew this mind and body and to celebrate my birthday among dear friends of long standing.

Thanksgiving and Christmas were celebrated in Athens, Big Canoe and in Atlanta with Page, Jeanne, and Lee. Life in two locales here in Georgia was challenging at first but has now become routine. The constant question, however: “Where is it — Athens, Big Canoe or Kyoto?”

Stars are now twinkling among the blackened tree trunks and branches. It is time to light the fire and spend a cozy evening enveloped by the streams, the trees, and the mountains.

ENOUGH! To all I wish a happy, healthful, and prosperous NEW YEAR OF THE MONKEY. (That’s my year so watch out for something of note to befall, befuddle or befriend me.)