Growing up in Japan: old factories, bombed out buildings, river rocks and ancient pines. America too new, I rode my bike to the fun zone to draw old buildings, hard to find. In London, I lived across the river from Battersea Power Station, made monochromatic etchings of power stations, airplanes, terminals and industrial wastelands. Pollution spewing smoke into the sky, horrible and beautiful, the ambiguity palpable. Since then I've been drawn to apocalyptic freeway innards.

Time and place are central to my vision, something in the land. From etchings to monotypes to collage and painting over that, the landscape appears, at first obscured by the multiple media until I left printmaking and moved to oils on canvas. Soon the act of painting in oils outside became an exciting challenge. Chasing the light, bracing against the wind, capturing a moment in time with the minimum of thought - I strive for the intuitive brush marks of the subconscious.

I paint my town, I'm out on the streets, talking to folks. The circle widens. Alongside the freeway here, the channel of the Arroyo Seco leads down to the main L.A. River, the Confluence. Freeways criss-cross above , its concrete banks etched with the signs and symbols of artists, warriors, storytellers. L.A.'s bridges are full of history, some as recent as last night taggers. Below the Hyperion Bridge, trees form islands midstream and the water sparkles amid river rocks on the soft bottom. The landscape is languid, pastoral. Safer painting perhaps? Further downstream, the soft bottom changes to hard and a jumble of freeways, bridges and interchanges arc across the river. Here is where I love to paint .

The confluence is my own personal convergence, where the two channels meet under the freeways and construction trucks splash around the river bottom laying pipes, tearing down and rebuilding. I paint there in the morning weekdays with the construction guys as my angels. Los Angeles. Walking down the access road to the riverbed, cement walls, posts and the underside of bridge and overpass are completely covered in intricate scrawls, clusters of initials and flowing script done large in blazing colors. Every inch of concrete, metal and wood display layer upon layer of tags, symbols and signs, faded and layered, eroding and newly slick from the night before. Then I come out into the riverbed and see the undersides of massive bridges soar overhead, the noise matched by the Metrolink passing on the farther bank and the freight trains bellowing behind me, sounding their horns above the rumble.

Before the rain, I was painting right there, but now the water has risen a few inches so I paint at the entrance to the river from the access road. When the trucks roll in, the water scatters the graffiti reflections into wild shapes reflecting Elysian Park, color and sky.

It is very important to me to paint at the place itself. I need to spend the time alone there to pick up on the feelings and memories in this monumental space. When I return to my studio with these paintings, I use them as a starting point for larger work, which I have only now just started to do. This interests me because it connects up with the work that began in art school, and before that.


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