Page 30 - the NOISE July 2015

The paintings of Sei Saito reflect the artist’s journey as a painter this summer at STORY BY THE JOURNEY TO ART Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff. CALEB MCCLURE
Sei Saito (pronounced Say Sigh-tow) has been on a journey to art her whole life. She was born an artist, but the societal expectations put on her prevented her from achieving her artistic potential for 40 years. June 23 through August 15 Ms. Saito shares a body of work “Journey,” at the Coconino Center for the Arts. “It’s just my life since I was born until now, until I die. That is a journey and that is everything that is in my painting. It goes directly onto my canvas,” said the artist.
Ms. Saito was born in Tokyo, Japan to a wealthy and very traditional Japanese family. She went to Musashino Art University in Tokyo, and had aspirations to pursue art as a career. Her family, however, didn’t take her artistic ambitions seriously. She was a Japanese woman, born to a wealthy family and they were incredibly overprotective of her. Her life already had a set path from the beginning, and she wasn’t involved in the planning. “You’re born into this family for the rest of your life, in this direction. You don’t need to worry about money. This is your grave over there. This is our graveyard — you don’t have to worry about anything — just floating,” said the painter.
She was supposed to get married and have kids, and that’s what she did. After she graduated art college she married a extremely successful Japanese man, and she was taken care of. She didn’t have to work. All she had to do was be a housewife and let her family take care of her. She painted some, and taught children art out of her home. During that time she painted the physical world — what she saw. Much of her subject matter was of nature, but Ms. Saito didn’t have much emotional attachment to those early pieces. It seemed her creativity was being suppressed, just as she was. Her artistic development would ultimately coincide with the development of someone close to her — her daughter Yuki.
When Yuki was 13 she was diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease called Alopecia Areata. It’s a condition that attacks the body hair of the infected, causing it to fall out. The family was devastated. Yuki started getting picked on relentlessly at school. They went to doctors in Japan, China and the US to try to find a cure for the ailment. Anger over the bullying her daughter endured still lives with her to this day and impacts her work. When Ms. Saito’s daughter started to grow stronger, so did she. Yuki never defeated Alopecia, but she started to grow more confident. One day Ms. Saito’s daughter decided she didn’t need to hide her disease anymore. “If my daughter doesn’t need to hide it any more I don’t need to hide it any more, so if I start saying, ‘O.k., my daughter has Alopecia and I don’t need to hide it anymore.’
That is everything — my feelings go onto the canvas directly,” said Ms. Saito. From then, the content of her paintings started to change.
The family came to the US in 1985 when Ms. Saito’s husband was relocated to Michigan for his work. One day, three years later, she woke up with a burning passion to once again attend art school. She had a deep connection with art school. When she attended in Japan she was young, single and free and she wanted that feeling again. She enrolled in art classes at the University of Michigan where she met Al Hinton. Mr. Hinton was an art professor — grumpy and waiting to go on sabbatical. Right away Mr. Hinton started to notice her work. “She had such an interesting idea of solving an art problem that was really head and shoulders above the other people I was dealing with, and I was very interested in what she was doing,” said Mr. Hinton. Ms. Saito was also intrigued by the art Mr. Hinton was creating.
Still, she couldn’t pursue art to the extent she needed to. Her daughter still needed her, and as a mother, she wasn’t ready to give up that responsibility. It wasn’t until Yuki was self-sufficient with a good job and had a daughter of her own to be responsible for, when Ms. Saito could finally become the artist she always felt she was. But before that could happen she needed to break away from the bonds that held her life to the path she was put into. She was tired of floating, and being taken care of — so, she divorced her husband.
“I want to be known by my first name the rest of my life — just being a mother, no. She found her life. Her life is her life, and my life should be my life,” said Ms. Saito. Her decision to get a divorce came with irreversible consequences. Her family in Japan no longer speaks to her. Her decision to get a divorce and to live in the U.S. gave her family a lot of anger. “I feel like I caused a lot of hurting because my family was really against my want to be an artist,” said the artist. But, she feels it was worth it to live the life she was always destined to live.
A decade later, she married the artist she met at the University of Michigan — Mr. Hinton. “It starts with art. I think if I was not an artist it wouldn’t be the same. I think the spirituality of our connection and our bonding relationship starts with art and developed from there,” said Mr. Hinton.
The two are so in sync they can tell each other’s artistic preferences through vague references to a group of paintings. “It’s like I have four eyes,” said Ms. Saito. They were connected
through the art they made, and now Ms. Saito finally has the
opportunity to pursue art to the extent she couldn’t before. “It was very late start, as most people start after college and
I started when I was almost 40,” said the artist. Her late start means she has a lot of catching up to do, and that motivates her to create.
Now, Ms. Saito has another sense of responsibility, but this time it leads her to relentlessly pursue the creation of beauty. Her husband and her have studios in Flagstaff and Tokyo, which they live at different times of the year. The space holds the artist accountable to make sure she works hard. “Most artists, they don’t have this space, and I feel, ‘Well I have this, so if I misuse it shame on me,’” said Ms. Saito.
She paints colossal canvasses up to 9 by 7 feet and no longer paints pictures of nature. Without drawing or much planning she paints what’s inside of her, and lets it come through organically. She paints when she is sad, scared or angry. She paints when she is upset with Mr. Hinton, or when something in her past is bothering her. In 2009, she painted for two weeks when she was diagnosed with cancer — from the time she was diagnosed to when she was scheduled for surgery. “I was so scared I didn’t know what’s going on, if surgery will be successful or not, but in the moment I didn’t have a big window — only time to paint,” said Ms. Saito.
Her paintings are an encapsulation of the journey she’s been living, filled with the complexities and emotions of a full, sometimes heartbreaking, many times beautiful life. There are representations of both of the places she’s lived, Japan and the U.S., in a strange juxtaposition that makes the world feel a bit smaller. She leaves the meaning of her paintings, a subjective representation that could mean anything, up to the viewer. “It’s a very emotional show that’s intrinsically tied to her own life, and the viewer can take that or leave that,” said show curator Erin Joyce.
However, no matter how sad or angry Ms. Saito is she doesn’t let that negativity consume her. She lets the beauty of adventure flow through her powerful work. “Every one of the paintings has hope, a dream or something good or a positive feeling and energy in it. Even very sad paintings say,
‘we’ll be ok.’ That is the message in every one of the pieces,” said the artist.
Ms. Saito’s show, “Journey,” will be at Coconino Center of the Arts, 2300 N. Fort Valley Road, from June 23-August 15. 928/779-2300. FlagArtsCouncil.org
| Caleb McClure is perfecting his repertoire of Korean Karaoke tunes during his travels this month. art@thenoise.us
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