Samizu Matsuki - Other Works

Other Works

Matsuki has painted and drawn more than 100 other works in oil on canvas, charcoal, pencil and pen.

In 1971, New York's towers have crumbled in her eerie work __opia, which truncated phrase is printed on a scrap of paper blowing past two women in the shattered landscape of the ruined city. The work took shape in her shocked reaction to discovering America's greatest city in decay, even fabled Harlem. Oil on canvas. Large size image of ___opia Audio recording: Samizu Matsuki describing this work(recorded April 18, 1989)

Also in 1971 Matsuki painted Barbara and the Fortune Teller: in which a young woman who had fled bourgeois suburbia for Greenwich Village, now flees what she'd just learned from a swart gypsy in a hovel beneath a howling subway crossing. Oil on canvas. Large size image of Barbara and the Fortuneteller

In 1973, after a year in Japan, Matsuki returned to New York City. A newspaper photograph of a wrecked Egyptian tank—in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War—became, in her 1974 oil painting Ah... a shattered, larger-than-life partly devoured lobster sprawling across bleak, ruffled newsprint. Oil on canvas. Ah... won the Award of Excellence at the Abraham & Straus-Hempstead Art Show, "Long Island Art '74".

According to Matsuki, her oil painting A Celebrator (Oil & canvas, 60"x 50") reflects the growing culture of detachment and narcissism that she saw enveloping America. Located, like Triumphal Return, in a basement, the painting-within-a-painting format, and the attention to detail of the figurines, the crystal, the scattered clothing, the carpet and hookah, the doubled image of an artillery shell recovered from the USS Maine, and the carefully impossible perspective make A Celebrator" one of her finest works. Large size image of A Celebrator

Samizu's 1976 painting Blue Ghost In this 1976 painting, Matsuki manifests a line in a Russian poem by Esunin. In that poem he said “Blue Ghost! Neither here nor there.” Matsuki describes her work Blue Ghost thus: "The painting depict some aspects of upper class bourgeois life which was then my environment. The mirror behind the central figure reflects finer things of the past. The left side of the painting represents the past, the center is the present, while the right side and the bottom, the future. The giant compass divides things of the past from those of the future. Through the arch one sees the debris of civilization."

"I painted Blue Ghost first in only two colors: titanium white and Payne’s gray. (I applied color afterward by method of glazing.) I found advantage in monochrome painting, freeing me from having to consider problems of matching shades of color. This gave me a perfect stage for freely developing image directly on the canvas."