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Artist materials

Chiura Obata

1885-1975

Artist materials, 2002

Various

Gift of the Obata Family, 2002

This selection of Chiura Obata's art materials includes a piece of raw mineral; a mortar and pestle for grinding pigment; bottles of hand-ground colors; sumi-ink sticks; a suzuri, or stone, for grinding sumi-ink sticks in water; a watercolor set; bamboo brushes; hand-carved seals for stamping the artist's signature; a lacquer box with red stamp pigment; and feather dusters.

Obata ground his own pigments from natural materials such as minerals, metals, seashells, and flowers. He used lapis lazuli for the blue water in Lake Basin in the High Sierra (ca. 1930; on view in this gallery). The powdered pigments were mixed with sumi-traditional Japanese black ink that is made from burned pine-tree soot mixed with vegetable-oil binders.

Describing the appropriate mental state for an artist, Obata wrote, "I still tell my friends that when you paint, concentrate your power; make your posture correct, keep your mind very calm, imagine in your mind what you want to paint. You quietly grind the sumi. Where you grind the sumi, the suzuri, is the shore, and where the ink pools is the ocean. You keep all your ideas in that ocean."