Sekino's Art World

Jun-ichiro Sekino (1914-1988) was a distinguished printmaker in Japan, and Yowsaku, his second son, has also become a printmaker residing in Tokyo. Shown below is one of the labor-intensive woodblock prints by Yowsaku entitled "Tomorrow" and the inset is Jun-ichiro's portrait of "Ayuko in Kimono." Ayuko is the baby sister of Yowsaku and Junpei. Junpei is the eldest son of Jun-ichiro and Katsuko Sekino (1918-2009), and he merged the two woodblock prints in such a way that Ayuko appears to enjoy Yowsaku's Mt. Fuji and city lights from her window.

Yowsaku often incorporates gold leaf into his woodblock prints. Shown below at left is one of the examples and is entitled "Sakura." It is a large print measured 52cm x 82cm and is extremely laborious and detailed as is usually the case in his work. See the illustration shown below at right, which is given by magnifying a small rectangular area at the upper right corner of the print.

Junpei lives in Portland, Oregon, as a retired mathematics professor. He is also known as a "digital" artist as he programs "digital" computers to create graphics such as the mountainous landscape shown below. It is not a photograph but was instead created by his number crunching computer programs.

Shown below are two more figures from Junpei's website, which he extracted from simple algebraic equations using the computer power. Junpei calls them "Seahorse Party" and "Computer Cosmos." Jun-ichiro Sekino taught his sons that two of the most important factors in graphic arts are spaciousness and dynamism: It is the artists' job to depict on a flat surface (like a paper) objects in the world that are three-dimensional and with energy.