Sculpture & Sumi-e Painting - George Tsutakawa

Seven Flowers (1970), George Tsutakawa

When my daughter was a teenager she played volleyball in a club called Wahine. There, she met the granddaughter of Northwest Sculptor & Painter, George Tsutakawa. While working for NEC in Bellevue, WA, I discovered one of his spectacular bronze fountains, Seven Flowers.

My UW Husky Pumpkin

George Tsutakawa taught at the University of Washington for nearly 30 years (1946-76) and was a trustee of the Seattle Art Museum (SAM). He had four adult children with careers in art, music, and writing, including his son, Gerard (or "Gerry"), whose "The Mitt" sculpture was installed at Safeco Field (now T-Mobile Park) in 1999. See my post from March 2020, entitled Sculpture -- Another dimension of Art. 

Fountain, Maplewood
Golf Course, Tsutakawa

Since then, I've spotted another smaller fountain on the patio of the River Rock Grill overlooking the Maplewood Golf Course in Renton, WA. Every time we've eaten there though, there has never been any water flowing through it. While still beautiful to look at, I am certain that it would be spectacular with the water cascading downward. I wonder if it would provide any mist on a hot Summer day!

Safeco Fountain (1973),
George Tsutakawa

At Seattle's Safeco Plaza sits another taller fountain, known simply as Safeco Fountain. Probably his most famous fountain, sitting outside the Fourth Avenue entrance to the Seattle Public Library, and is known as the Fountain of Wisdom (1958-60). The shapes of these fountains represent flowers and trees, sacred symbols of regeneration.

The Fountain of Wisdom (Left) without water and (Right) with water.

Tsutakawa was once known for his abstract wooden sculptures called 'Obos', which are based on structures made of stacked rocks left one at a time by pilgrims to the Indian Himalayas. Early on, he was influenced by his teachers, Alexander Archipenko and Ambrose McCarthy Patterson, as well as sculptor, Constantin Brancusi. During the 1950s, known as his experimentation period, Tsutakawa was inspired by rock cairns that Tibetan travelers built along mountain passes as offerings to the gods. One such statue was installed in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1971, then removed in 2008. Read about it at WikiVisually.

He also took inspiration from Japanese pagodas and Indian stupas.

George Tsutakawa George died December 18, 1997, of longtime heart problems, leaving a legacy of over 75 fountains inspired by Eastern respect for natural materials and in an abstraction of Western (European) modernism. Besides his interest in sculpture as an art form, he was also a painter and printmaker, using the ancient art of Sumi-e. Tsutakawa and other contemporary artists of today use both monochromatic ink, or ‘Sumi’, in combination with watercolor painting, or ‘e’.

Hurricane Ridge (1981)

Sumi-e by
Darlene Dihel

Sumi paintings use ink-wash in different concentrations to create lines of varying weight/widths much like the East Asian art of calligraphy. Originated by the Chinese, the Japanese began to adopt it as an art form in the 2nd half of the 14th century.

Such paintings may be described as impressions based on their sparse use of line and color to suggest symbolic shapes of clouds, mountains, animals, fish, and other elements of nature. One of my colleagues at the Black Diamond Arts Alliance specializes in Sumi-e painting. I hope to interview more local artists in subsequent 2021 posts.

During February and March, I plan to experiment with watercolor washes embellished by various thicknesses of lines using ink pens I received for my birthday from my friends in Arizona. I am particularly inspired by this photo I took of the sun setting behind our house.