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Drue Kataoka’s passion is a demanding two thousand-year-old Japanese art form called sumi-e. She says of the art form, “When you take the ink-loaded brush to paper, and you’re waiting to release the brush stroke, you know it is final. The ink is indelible; you can’t remove or take back anything.”
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Kataoka saw her first sumi-e landscapes in a Tokyo museum when she was five and earned her master’s signature stamp by the age of 17.
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Commenting on her sports’ art featuring a crew team she says, “The rowers are abstracted into their most essential form, and are completely synchronized in their movement.”
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You’re not likely to find a traditional landscape in Kataoka’s portfolio. She’d rather paint sports. She says, “What I was thinking about in this painting is the explosion of women in sports and what a positive thing that has been, for all of us.”
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“Every time I paint a subject, I search for the underlying kinship, the swish of the brush, the swish of the hoop, the crack of the bat, the wailing gesture of the jazzman’s horn.”
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Kataoka loves music and loves to paint anything with music in it. But it was the sounds of history that inspired her painting of Stanford’s commemorative poster of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“I tried to distil sounds just beneath the black ink, and think of the tired feet marching towards freedom, the layered voice of call and response, the swelling of the spirituals, and all these sounds, and tried to put them into the brush strokes.”
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Long before the brush meets the paper, Kataoka studies her subjects such as Stanford basketball star Kate Starbird. “I just tried to watch her, the reverse lay-up over and over again, on the footage, and in real life, then tried to create the brush strokes that had that same kind of motion, and release, and dynamism, to them.”
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Tara Vanderveer is the Stanford women’s basketball coach and she says of Kataoka’s art, “People look at, like a Kate Starbird, and that was the move she made, and they remember it.”
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Kataoka’s commemorative posters have raised money for athletic scholarships and charities. At 21, this master sumi-e artist has her eyes on history, and leaves her artistic footprint in brushed black ink.
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From a news story by CNN San Francisco Reporter Don Knapp. January 26, 2000
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