~Rebecca Pyle
It was this quote from Yuno Shiota's Instagram profile, once translated, that really pulled me into Shiota's art, as I feel the same about writing: I want it to be so ingrained in my life that I go to it without thinking, and in some ways it is. I'm always tucking away turns of phrase, bits of conversation, and names of blooming plants for later use. It sounds as if Shiota is doing the same in her daily life in Japan. I love the idea that we were strangers, living continents apart, speaking different languages, immersed in very different artistic endeavors, but with the same philosophy humming along beside us—and some of the same challenges. I'm grateful that Shiota took time from her busy schedule as an artist and a mother to share her beautiful art with West Trestle Review, and I'm grateful to Deborah Iwabuchi for translating the interview.
Patricia Caspers: You are a writer as well as an artist, and I read that you love fairytales. Are there ways you bring fairytales into your visual art?
Rebecca Pyle: Could it be true that in almost every painting, if it's brave/successful, there is a suggested thicket, or glass mountain, or almost unfindable place which the hero, or heroine, has found? Even if the painting does not provide the way through, the way across, or any other directions, it represents a challenge already met, at least partially. I think.
I'm trying to think of paintings which someone might suggest none of those could apply to. And can't. Even a modern canvas painted purely one color. (What banished the other colors? Can a person learn from or escape from the enclosure of this one solitary color? Should one? How?) (Is that one block of color the expression of the soul of one person? Is that color part of the answer of a riddle? And so on ...) But then again, I'm a bit odd.
PC:
Rebecca Pyle: Could it be true that in almost every painting, if it's brave/successful, there is a suggested thicket, or glass mountain, or almost unfindable place which the hero, or heroine, has found? Even if the painting does not provide the way through, the way across, or any other directions, it represents a challenge already met, at least partially. I think.
I'm trying to think of paintings which someone might suggest none of those could apply to. And can't. Even a modern canvas painted purely one color. (What banished the other colors? Can a person learn from or escape from the enclosure of this one solitary color? Should one? How?) (Is that one block of color the expression of the soul of one person? Is that color part of the answer of a riddle? And so on ...) But then again, I'm a bit odd.
PC:
Rebecca Pyle lives on what was once the lakebed of the then-greater Great Salt Lake. Her writing (poetry, fiction, essays, reviews) and artwork are in numerous art/literary journals and reviews and chapbooks published in the United States, Hong Kong, India, Germany, England, Belgium, Austria, France, Ireland, Northern Ireland. See Rebecca Pyle’s Poets & Writers profile.
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