Painter George Miyasaki is among the most accomplished artists of his time. While the artist was understated in person, Miyasaki's talent spoke for itself; the prodigious mastery of color and form in his paintings and prints immediately set him apart from the generation of artists contending with the legacy of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950s. Consequently, he rose to prominence early: Miyasaki was selected to appear in multiple international Bienniale exhibitions, printed two profoundly influential lithograph editions for Willem de Kooning, taught at CCAC and Stanford University, received an exhaustive list of awards including the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, and worked at Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles and Atelier 17 in Paris – all by the age of twenty-seven.

Born in Kalopa, Hawaii in 1935, Miyasaki demonstrated an aptitude for drawing and painting from a young age. At the urging of a high school art instructor he enrolled in California College of the Arts, intending to major in commercial art; in subsequent years, friendships with Billy Al Bengston and Manuel Neri helped steer Miyasaki toward fine art, as did the development of close relationships with instructors Nathan Oliviera and Richard Diebenkorn. Having received countless prizes and awards from competitive exhibitions as an undergraduate, Miyasaki earned a BFA in 1955 and was recognized with his first solo exhibition at the Gump's Gallery in San Francisco. He continued studying with Oliviera and Diebenkorn as a graduate student and upon receiving an MFA in 1958 he was immediately offered a position teaching printmaking, printing, and drawing at CCAC.

One marvels both at the swiftness with which the young Miyasaki distinguished himself from his peers and the inarguably meritocratic nature of his ascent. Miyasaki’s successes had nothing to do with social maneuvering or superficial self-promotion: his reputation was earned. Miyasaki worked ferociously and relentlessly submitted his work to competitive juried exhibitions. He let his artwork do the talking, and for a time it brought him international acclaim; ultimately, though, he would not become a household name like many of his mentors and peers. In part this was the artist’s choice: frustrated with the turbulence of the art world and trying to reconstruct his family after a troubled divorce, he noticeably retreated from the gallery scene into his studio in the 1970s. As a younger man, Miyasaki’s prodigious talent had allowed him to easily wield and master whatever tendency was au courant, from abstract expressionism to figuration to color field painting. As a more mature artist, his focus shifted: rather than addressing the critical posture of the day, Miyasaki’s paintings (and later prints) began to hone in on extremely subtle shifts of color. Compared to the physicality and energy of his works from the 1950s, one senses a shift towards artist-as-scientist, performing carefully measured experiments and perfecting his craft in the privacy of his laboratory.

On a formal level, Miyasaki's work has always been notable for its pervasive sense of order and balance. The young Miyasaki's paintings filtered the aggressive, gestural spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism through his own unique sensibility, creating works that were powerful, yet measured and subtle. Informed by his studies with Bay Area Figurative painters like Richard Diebenkorn, Miyasaki's paintings radiate an expressionistic intensity derived not from the discordant drips and splashes of the spontaneous Ab Ex encounter, but from a meticulous compositional strategy that uses subtle juxtapositions of color and line to achieve an overall sense of resolution and harmony. "If his work is a tour de force," Rudy Turk wrote in 1981, "that tour de force is never obtrusive, always subtle and ordered. Miyasaki's paintings proclaim the essential and basic sanity of mankind and the universe."

Of his print editions, David Acton writes in a 1993 essay that Miyasaki “loved the chemistry and mystery of the process” of printmaking, positing that “the real theme of [his] prints was the process of their creation, the manipulation and behavior of the materials.” He notes that the unexpectedly harmonious combinations and interactions in Miyasaki’s work constitute “an organic mix in which many viewers have seen allegories to Nature...[seeming] to reflect the apparent randomness and complexity of creation, that is actually underpinned by physical order.”

Print making at CCAC

Summer Field

Oil on canvas

1958

Beside the artist's instantly recognizable impasto of oil and acrylic on canvas, Miyasaki is associated with two printmaking techniques in particular, both of which utilize spontaneous layering to build up an image. The first, color lithography, became the artist's favorite technique as a student in the 1950s. Miyasaki would paint directly on a litho stone with asphaltum solution and tusche; draw, scrape, and scratch away details and highlights, and print this composition. The stone was then chemically defaced and resensitized, so that only a ghost of the prior painting remained. The artist used this ghost image as the basis for subsequent layers, repeating this process and using the opposite behavior of the opaque asphaltum and the transparent washes of tusche to gradually build up a composite image. "Some passages," writes David Acton in 1993, "repeatedly bitten by strong counteretching solution, became deeply eroded and three dimensional, lending an almost sculptural quality to the printed surface."

The second technique, the relief process of collagraphy, in which nearly anything can be used as a dimensional printing matrix, expands on this sculptural quality. Miyasaki prepared his collagraph plates by collaging various textured materials onto a wood or masonite panel with liquid gesso or epoxy; after each 'run' of inking and printing, the artist would modify the plate or change colors, such that the final image was the result of a combinatory process of layering. In the mid-1960s, Miyasaki's work began to incorporate stencils, spray effects, and transfer images, as well as a greater degree of figuration; in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the surfaces of his works became even more complex with the addition of layers of collaged paper. However, collagraphy was the technique to which he most frequently returned: having begun using the method in the late 1950s, he continued to print collagraphs, many of which were published by Magnolia Editions, through 2011.

Miyasaki lived to paint and his friends and family are emphatic when recalling his intense devotion and the long hours he spent in the studio. It is clear that this passion was informed by a wholehearted love of beauty and aesthetic perfectionism, as evidenced by the painter’s other interests. Miyasaki and his first wife were avid “bottle diggers” – seekers and collectors of buried antique bottles – practically before the term was invented. The painter’s daughter Julie recalls pre-dawn drives to Benicia with her parents to find bottles; while the kids frolicked on the beach, the Miyasakis would dig for treasure before the tide came in, unearthing gorgeous, sparkling glass artifacts, some more than a hundred years old. The monetary value of these objects, says the artist’s daughter, was inconsequential to her father, who prized them for their beauty; perhaps hints of their subtle irridescence can be felt in the delicate treatment of light and color in Miyasaki’s paintings. The artist was also a brilliant gardener and a talented cook: a regular at Berkeley’s storied Tokyo Fish Market, he was passionate about preparing the finest ingredients and sharing them with his friends and children. Miyasaki continued to paint through the last years of his life, making prints through 2011 and then painting in his home studio until his passing in 2013. His quiet strength and love of beauty live on in his powerful, prodigious body of work: his prints and paintings stand as a record of a historic period, as chronicled by an extraordinary and inimitable talent.

Nicholas Stone

Passage

Color Lithograph,

1964

George in front of painting

of friend Peter Voulkos