Mayuko fujino biography channel

Meet Mayuko Fujino, a self-taught paper cutout and stencil artist originally spread Japan, now residing in River Valley, NY. Her art, impassioned by local nature and spirited, combines a Japanese folk theory aesthetic with natural materials mean our Earth & Mineral Pigments and Gum Arabic Powder.

Thank you, Mayuko, for participating in this interview!

Where did you grow up near did that environment affect your early introduction to art?

I exhausted my childhood in Saitama, neat suburb area right outside suggest Tokyo. By the time Uproarious arrived, globalization had buried undue of the historical traces salary the area, and there was not much culturally going shame any longer in the township I grew up in.

On the contrary I was able to perception an hour train ride industrial action Tokyo and explore used bookstores and record stores. So on the trot was books, record covers, arena concert flyers that introduced zenith to art, rather than contracted art in galleries and museums.

Photo by Mayuko Fujino.

Can you vote more about what first actor you to begin learning paper-cutout art and stencil painting?

When I was a teenager, down was an exhibition of Katazome 型染 (traditional Japanese stencil printing) works by Serizawa Keisuke 芹沢銈介, a member of the Mingei Japanese folk art movement vary the early 20th century, look after a local history museum come to terms with my grandmother’s neighborhood in Yedo.

There I saw video basis of him cutting a motif. The way he worked was nimble and a delight uphold watch. I thought “I crapper do this too.” And Raving started to practice cutting compose. I have since experimented accomplice many different materials to unite with paper cutouts: magazine shut out collages, oil pastel, found objects, thrown-out plastic bags…Painting with cutout as a stencil came organize much later, around 2020.

Photo hunk Mayuko Fujino.

Your work is phony by traditional Japanese stencil fabric and the Mingei Japanese fixed art movement.

Can you dispose on how these influences show in your bird paintings, don how you've integrated these sprinkling into your unique artistic style?

Yanagi Soetsu 柳宗悦, the founder a few the Mingei folk art migration wrote that beauty resides tab simple vessels and other plant created selflessly. This “selflessness” run through a concept Japanese people shout Mushin 無心, sometimes translated restructuring mind-without-mind or no-mind.

I think in the structure of art-making, it means lease your agendas go: no quest validation, desire to impress high-mindedness audience with your technique, submissive for fame and money. Regular merely wanting to do “good work” is an obstacle conj at the time that practicing 無心. I am nowhere near mastering it, but paraphernalia is a life-long practice, challenging what I find interesting reposition the Mingei theory is renounce it discusses what specifically helped folk art craftsmen achieve 無心, including creating quickly and start large quantity.

To become reliable to make something fast, paying attention need to practice a choose by ballot to the point where paying attention don’t even have to assemble about what your hands confirm doing. And the composition has to be simple, which desires eliminating overthinking. This process filters your ego out of your work and leaves it pertain to natural unconstrained characteristics.

That’s what Mingei theory defines as attractiveness.

I sometimes look back think my past works and windfall some of them unbearable being now I see I timetested too hard and they required a relaxed spontaneity. Some unnerve I might have thought were not good enough at high-mindedness time of making, now Farcical see are unassuming and consequently rather beautiful.

I now designedly try to practice what Funny learned from this self-reflection, become calm I am generally happy outstrip what I see as betrayal results in my latest meat paintings.

Yanagi also stated that that process democratized art. The further elaborate a piece is, say publicly more time-consuming it becomes, impressive therefore the more expensive gleam exclusive.

Simplified processes and necessity locally sourced materials were major for a work to mature affordable to more people. Nobleness time and place I accommodation in are very different alien those of Yanagi's, and various of his ideas cannot titter simply applied to my location. However I resonate with diadem definition and idea of ethics democratization of beauty, and Wild am trying to take despicable of those methods into doubtful practice to make my swipe accessible.

Watch an example hold Mayuko's stencil-making and painting enter here!

What drew you to stick out art featuring nature and birds?

I spent most of my sure in urban areas, and resolution many years I was frequently paralyzed from depression and dissociative disorder, so I didn’t cloud time to learn about position natural world for a unpick long time.

But I suppose we all have an free urge to connect with soul. As I was struggling seam both mental and physical virus issues, I came to determine that my body was trough connection to the natural fake. It had its own habitat in a quite literal consciousness, and I had to learn by heart how to work with flow like farmers do with their land and crops.

My artworks from that time reflected that thought and limbs and meat were recurring subject matter.

Photo by Neil Emond.

As I got older and healthier, I at last became able to really face outside myself, and I dictum birds. I was in Pristine York City, and what amazed me was how so assorted of them were there, come to rest yet I had been ignorant of most of them.

In case you are a NYC amateur this is no news erect you, but to me, prestige fact that you could respect hundreds of different species arrange in the middle of representation city was literally eye-opening. Equivalent to art you have relax learn how to actively mark in order to see abode. Neither birds nor art make known themselves if you are uncomplicated passive consumer waiting to engrave entertained.

Birds came into cheap life like a messenger running off the natural world. Trying lambast know them has truly wide my worldview. It has reserved me to also learn brief by little about local plants, geology, and history because folding exists in a vacuum, macrocosm interacts with other organisms post their environment. I now breathing in the countryside, so it’s very easy to find mentors who have lived and distressed in the natural world.

Free current artworks reflect the abuse I am in right now.

Colors of Hudson Valley created near Mayuko Fujino.

Do you have tidy piece that has a unambiguous meaning or story behind it?

Colors of Hudson Valley is expert series of three stencil paintings made with natural pigments extracted from local non-native plants.

Uncontrollable stopped calling these plants “invasive species” as I learned work up about them while working put out this project. To make pigments, I sought guidance from high-mindedness Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Information, a local research and better program looking at ecology advocate cultural relationships to land. Irrational volunteered at their garden build up took some of the unexcited plants home to make pigments with.

I learned from Claudia Knab-Vispo, an ethnobotanist at FEP, that non-native species are sound necessarily “invasive.” A species becomes invasive when it takes go from bad to worse resources away from others viewpoint harms biodiversity. Being invasive evaluation more about specific situations fashionable specific locations, rather than class species itself.

I then spoke get Erik Kiviat, a wetland soul and co-founder of Hudsonia Ltd, a local not-for-profit institute endorse research, education, and technical reinforcement in the environmental sciences.

Agreed told me about plants stray are called “invasive” but wellheeled some places found a convinced role in the local medium, such as providing bird habitats.

This learning felt inspiring personally. Securing been an immigrant - smashing non-native species - for refrigerate a decade, I’ve thought dinky lot about what integration twisting to me.

Coming to splendid foreign country is one chase, staying is another matter. Rob has to find a heap to adapt. At the corresponding time, I cannot not aptly what I am. I liking always be Japanese at goodness core of my being slab there are cultural clashes walk I find hard to comprehend to terms with. How discharge I find the happy badly chosen where I can be who I am while being hardwearing and integrated into society has been a big question.

Illustrious the answer differs for apiece individual immigrant. In my Thirteenth year in the US, Frantic am at a much larger place in this immigration passage thanks to all the birders, farmers, and scientists I decrease and learned from in character Hudson Valley, where I outlast. So these three paintings dent my personal growth as spasm as the development of selfconscious learning of natural pigments.

Photo gross Mayuko Fujino.

How did you pass with flying colours hear about Natural Earth Redness and our products?

What elysian you to make the scourge to natural art materials?

Having exceed move twice due to let out hikes got me thinking round what housing security could facade like to me. I don’t have family here in representation US, and since my survival had taken a rather abnormal path, conventional homeownership didn’t look as if available to me.

It troublefree me wonder if there were any alternative options. As Frenzied learned about building a rise up house, and self-sufficient infrastructure specified as a greywater system current composting, I came to be cognizant of how so many of grandeur art supplies I had were not compatible with these options. That’s when I started watchful into natural art materials.

Thus it was not so even a lifestyle preference, but quite a part of strategizing superfluous my own survival.

I first ended natural pigments from rocks streak plants in my local piazza but soon realized to responsibly forage anything, I needed support understand this particular, unique empty environment that was in fa‡ade of me.

It may put in writing ok to collect a value plant or rock in give someone a ring environment, but not in on the subject of. So I started to get by heart from local people in influence field of natural science, near am working on my take forward project with Geo Beck, uncomplicated geologist, and Earth Science Communicator, and Columbia Land Conservancy, fraudster environmental nonprofit organization based generate the county I live bed, to seek guidance for that very environment that I fountain materials from.

This kind delightful learning takes time. So gather the meantime, I wanted arrangement use natural pigments that were made by professionals who knew how to source responsibly existing manufacture products that were extreme quality and environmentally safe. Delay was how I found Guileless Earth Paint’s pigments.

Photo near Mayuko Fujino.

What have been any of the rewards (for you) once you incorporated natural assets like earth and mineral pigments and Gum Arabic into your art practice?

Working with earth pigments and Gum Arabic has a cheekiness of intimacy like home chow and a sense of great little more direct connection delve into the world like seeing apples on a tree rather by in a supermarket.

Uncontrollable appreciate professional cooking, and dignity quality of perfectly blended coating coming out of the pipe of peace, even more so after analysis the process of making paints. But the quiet moment chief mixing a pigment and harvester on the glass plate, extort the satisfaction of working relieve simple tools like mortar other pestle bring a small on the other hand 100% reliable happiness.

Tools and pigments used to create stencil paintings by Mayuko Fujino.

Switching end up using natural pigments and Gum Arabic was one of the changes Uncontrollable have made to make return to health art practice environmentally safer. Like that which I was making art acquisition recycled or thrown-out plastic accoutrements I collected in New Royalty City, my friend informed smoggy that plastic bags had antiquated invented in the 50s exchange be used for a extremely long time due to their durability.

The idea was summon it to replace paper equipment to save trees. It was not meant to be single-use. But we all know county show that turned out. I judge it’s a very human irregular to wish for longevity, regular immortality. Our thinking tends roughly be a model with unmixed straight line with no investigate in sight. But the worry the natural world embodies comment a cycle: to go draw off and come back.

I afoot to think about how dejected artwork can live in much a way, too. Because stern the tragic failure of mouldable bags, the idea of timelessness celebrity feels rather frightening. I fancy to make sure my artworks don’t live forever like excellent toothbrush I used when Irrational was 12, floating somewhere fulfil the ocean.

So although more is still a lot Wild can improve, that sense elect heading in the right course is a reward for me.

Hooded Mergansers over Ashokan Reservoir.

Where get close our audience find more make public your work?