Mitsuru Watanabe Interjects A Modern Perspective Onto Classic Paintings
Images courtesy of Rehs Contemporary and the artist.
Honkadori is a specific kind of allusion in Japanese poetry that references an older work. The source material should be widely known and readily reveal to readers a deeper understanding of both the source and the new work quoting it.
The concept is foundational to Mitsuru Watanabe’s paintings that, in his view, offer a healthy confrontation with the Western canon.
“When I learned that there was a technique called honkadori, I thought it was interesting,” says Watanabe. “It seemed like an invasion or challenge to the idea of Western art and original works.”
Watanabe’s current style utilizes the backgrounds, figures, and objects included in some of the most famous paintings by Western canon artists. Renaissance figures like Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Raphael are frequent fodder, as well as museum darlings like Rousseau and Bosch. If an artist is the mononymous cornerstone of one art historical epoch or another, his or her work might well soon be fodder for Watanabe.
Once Watanabe has meticulously recreated a backdrop from one such aforementioned source, he adds a kind of personal flourish to intrude on the perceived sacredness of the space. This intrusion is often accomplished by none other than the cherubic visage of one of his daughters, Shiro Yukiko and Naoko.
“As long as I live,” he says, “they will go around the world, forever recorded in these paintings as children, like Peter Pan.”
The genesis of this style stemmed from when Shiro Yukiko and Naoko were very young, when Watanabe spent his downtime reading. Learning about honkadori led him to interrogate the relationship between reverence, fame, and originality in canonical European paintings.
Honkadori negates the idea of independence and uniqueness. Art and thought exist on a continuum. New and old ideas interact with each other. What exists and might exist are interdependent. The old gives inspiration for the new and the new encourages us to reassess the old.
Watanabe says, “The concept of original painting is like a barrier that prevents intrusion. The work itself is required to be independent and complete within the work. My idea was to aim for pure painting that eliminated any noise from the original painting. I thought that idea was Marxist and bad. (In the sense that there is a correct and single future of painting.) However, honkadori denies independence. I thought that was interesting. In other words: Is my painting an impure painting or a noise painting? Ultimately, I kept all this in mind and made my debut with the intention of being beaten back by the painting world, but nobody touched me.” That last line, it is worth noting, is said with a laugh.
“Open doors” are a frequent metaphor Watanabe uses to describe the function of his daughters in his paintings. He approaches the quoted works as a landscape painter and selects whatever moves him to see one of his daughters moving around within that landscape.
When I learned that there was a technique called honkadori, I thought it was interesting. It seemed like an invasion or challenge to the idea of Western art and original works.”
Shiro Yukiko and Naoko, however, aren’t the only subjects that Watanabe has used to conquer these canonical spaces. “Afternoon Nap” features one of Watanabe’s acquaintances lying nude against Paul Delvaux’s monumental 1946 masterpiece “Le Train Bleu.” The figure lays atop soft, white sheets and is framed by a lush red curtain. A book on Delvaux is next to the figure while she seems to dream of the painting in the background. In another series, Watanabe placed boxes of caramels in front of feathery landscapes.
“I don’t mean to limit my work to portraying children,” says Watanabe, “but, in my head, I see the kids start moving in the painting. If I can access the space and transform it, the work will change from an object meant to be appreciated into a functioning space like a tool. Just by having my daughters enter a painted space created by others, the space will not change, but will still manage to change for some elusive reason that’s difficult to put into words. Are the daughters like the only open doors in the space? That gives me joy.”
There is an immense sense of joy that seems to fill Watanabe, also, when he opines on the Western artworks that he copies. He is especially fascinated by the old masters’ quest to capture the variances of light and darkness. One major difference he finds between artistic traditions in Japan and the West, broadly, is the use of outlining.
“Since Japanese people have used brushes since ancient times,” he says, “they have caught objects and people in outlines. It eventually becomes like an ukiyo-e expression, a technique of placing flat colors in the outline.”
My idea was to aim for pure painting that eliminated any noise from the original painting.”
While his capacity for copying old masters has improved with practice, it also improved after he began to chronicle and embrace this essential difference. Outlining and flattened colors were, for a time, a trap that kept him from fully capturing the European artist’s styles he aimed to mimic.
Of all the paintings he has copied, the one that he found the most invigorating was Peter Paul Rubens’s “Descent from the Cross.” He placed the dynamic, diagonal scene in the midst of one of Henri Rousseau’s forests. The presence of Rubens work plays into the primordial aspect of Rousseau’s landscape. The wild and unknowable becomes generative and issues forth something the viewer can relate to.
“Realism reminds me of a gray ground motion theory and an empty Newtonian space. When I think of Michelangelo, I think of cartoonishly excessive bodies. Botticelli is all stage setting. That ‘Descent from the Cross’ was a studio production and, really, not a very good one. But I was happy when I had done it because I think I got it a little close to how Rubens painted. I want to try it again, only larger,” says Watanabe.
Another commonality within Watanabe’s recent paintings is their invariably large size. The level of detail requires two to three months from start to finish for each work. (Watanabe jokes that the details require a little more attention than they used to now, since he has started using reading glasses.)
Preparations begin by working through how to enlarge or shrink the original work that he will be citing. A flurry of sketches helps him work through that process. Projectors are no good for the work, since the lens can distort the original image. Once the sketching gets the results he is looking for, Watanabe spatulas a thin layer of gesso with calcium carbonate all over a canvas. The base color is applied three times in acrylic and then the scene and figures are roughly traced in. The rough details are painted in oil and he uses a fan to remove brush eyes. Details are added next, traced first and then in oil.
A significant portion of the months taken to make these paintings, however, is spent on preparatory sketches. “It is difficult to change the image once you’re beyond sketching,” says Watanabe. Despite its utmost importance to his process, the artist discards the sketch once its purpose is finished.
“Realism reminds me of a gray ground motion theory and an empty Newtonian space. When I think of Michelangelo, I think of cartoonishly excessive bodies.”
Watanabe’s youth was spent surrounded by art books and on trips to the museum. His mother, an amateur painter and art school graduate, would act as his guide on those trips. Art, however, was not a major interest at that time. That changed after he made an oil painting that received great compliments from his artistic mother.
Local junior high and high schools offered little in the way of art-related extracurriculars. The art classes that were available were “meaningless,” and a music class was less of a creative outlet than, in Watanabe’s words, a “bitter memory.”
He says, “I am self-taught. My high school didn’t have an art teacher and I didn’t study art at university. I learned from the technique books that my mother kept around, but its lessons were still pretty limited.”
Still, a call to paint rung deep from within. Marriage led to children and Watanabe knew that he would need to earn money one way or another. He gambled on his art and planned a solo exhibition in Tokyo. Around the same time, he wrote a play that friends at a local theater put on. Sales from that first solo exhibition and the play funded another exhibition in Ginza.
Around that time, the economy in Tokyo popped and what little money Watanabe was making from art began to dry up. Things turned around, though, after he won ten million yen (roughly $90,000) in a high-stakes art competition. That win brought attention from art fairs as well as Christies in Hong Kong.*
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