By way of Joan Linder at White Columns, I was thinking on the way to the bank, there is a guy here by the name of Hoki Nobuya who is a painter and who now actually just draws. His idea is that through drawing, and through the use of a simple format of using color paper he is able to pull forward painting into a contemporary environment by going back to its simple start. I mention this because I am too very interested in this eloquent and versatile state. Hoki used various diversions in his earlier work to control the spatial ambiguity that arises from drawing fairly straight--recording a passage of time employing the traditional.

I thought there were problems.

Going through Joan Linder's works online at WC kind of brought me to a parallel reconsideration of HokI's new work, absent of the previous obvious diversions, to face again this eloquent simple. I guess the two words 'eloquent' and 'simple' have often a habit of canceling each other out--or are each words just plain or systematically misplaced.

In Linder's case instead of changing the color of paper to revitalize plain drawing she does so through the shift in line color and the sweep of the paper. I saw Hoki's work at Roppongi Crossing, at Mori Museum this Sunday and thought how wonderfully fresh they looked compared with the other sprinkling of traditional media, while plainly not doing so much outside the simple mark making of color pencil on color paper. He uses the vertical for landscape and horizontal for figure to block a visual tendency of the traditional (western) space to rid the window and a figure ground relation. With a figure on a horizontal you loose the top and bottom and get too much of the sides left over. It has interesting results. But I thought why employ any tradition, especially not your own.

Linder takes on the scroll format from the east. It's odd how there is a crossing of paths, using the other as a way to throw time, energy, and consideration into another space. What I particularly enjoy with both is this eloquent motivation that sort of dispenses with sophistication, to concentrate on whatever else is there. Painters quite often raise this technique issue, via the different (possible/impossible) ways to push paint around--and I wonder--is the building up of trial and error, which eventually leads to a success actually a short term success while building a hidden mountain, one which, eventually, you struggle get over. While deep down there is always that desire to try and be, as much as physically possible, 'spontaneous'--trying something different without having the heap, taking leap even if to lose so much. I mean what is the heap worth when its only a diversion?