Disparate artists join for show

"Medium 3" presents the work of three drastically different artists like a scalene triangle: a completed, satisfying space filled with no equal sides and no equal angles.

"We chose three artists, three mediums, from three different ages," said gallery director Christy Taka­mune. "We also chose them for their love of nature. But aside from that, they’re quite different."

A working professional artist for decades, Seikichi "Chick" Takara, the eldest contributor of "Medium 3," is also its star.

"I’ve made art most of my 86 1/2 years," he said, walking through the gallery with the cane he now uses after a mishap with a papaya tree a few years ago. "When I was a boy, I used to walk from our house across the street at King and McCully to the art school. Barefoot, both ways!"

He pointed to an abstract titled "Manoa," an azure acrylic that resembles a burst of sunlight through a valley rain cloud.

"I met my second wife with a painting like this. I had a show at the hospital where she was working, and I was cleaning up. She thought I was a janitor at first," he said, smiling. "She was surprised to learn I was the artist who did the painting she passed every day at work. We married five years later."

In person Takara is affable and sagacious. But in his work he’s nearly impossible to pin down. His paintings can be traced to Rothko, Monet, cartoons. Or his peers Satoru Abe and Tadashi Sato, who, like Takara, were nisei men of a certain generation who dedicated themselves the development of contemporary abstraction through the latter half of the 20th century.

Yukio Ozaki, professor of environmental interior design and fine arts at Chaminade University of Honolulu, was pleased that his work is blended with the others’ for the exhibit.

"I would’ve never thought to put us together, but it works so well," he said.

Ozaki has won nearly as many awards for his teaching as he has for his ceramic and wood sculptures and, like Takara, is articulate and verbose.

"I didn’t know these guys before this show, but I felt so comfortable being in the same space with them. It’s quite arranged, a beautiful show, in a way that sometimes art shows are not," he said. "It’s important to keep involved with these things; otherwise, I’ll become a pure academic," he said, laughing.

Ozaki is revered as a master ceramist for his ability to combine textures, forms and colors in self-contained pieces that are always balanced and never garish.

His work punctuates Takara’s paintings alongside David Kiyabu’s sculptures.

Kiyabu’s stonework is the product of years of apprenticeship in Italy. Several of his marble sculptures resemble refined, polished fishhooks and water droplets circling in on themselves. They’re roughed out from stone, each the product of hours of rasping and finishing, a contrast to the textural dimensions of Ozaki’s ceramics.

Kiyabu’s temperament is also a contrast to that of his exhibit partners. He tends to speak little of his craft and instead directs attention to his work.

"David is the quiet one of the group," Ozaki said. "I respect his way of not explaining his work. He is the artist that communicates with the material."

If you visit "Medium 3," be sure to look out for Takara, whose personality has become an installation in itself in the gallery.

"This might be my last hurrah," he said in front of a blue-and-gold seascape serigraph.

Then he pointed to his witty trading cards in the gift shop that depict the Asian lunar new year, a surprising divergence from the seascapes and abstract expressionism on the gallery walls.

"These are a hit because they’re a bit more affordable," he said with another smile. "Never stop working, never stop creating."