This Oakville artist is one of the world’s foremost practitioners of the woodcut print. At 89, she just received a high honour from Japan - Toronto Star

Naoko Matsubara's work is in the British Museum, the Smithsonian, the Albertina, and Tokyo's National Museum of Modern Art.

A few weeks ago, I visited the artist Naoko Matsubara at her home in Oakville, where she has lived since the 1970s. The house, which she designed, is a majestic example of Japanese modernism, with its horizontal construction, low-set roofs and dark wood siding, set back in dense greenery.

Matsubara, who is 89, is one of the world’s foremost practitioners of the woodcut print, in which a design is carved into a block of wood, ink is applied to the block, and paper is pressed onto it to transfer the image.

Naoko Matsubara works on a piece in her home studio.

In July, Naruhito, the Emperor of Japan, conferred the Order of the Rising Sun upon Matsubara, recognizing her effort to promote the relationship between Canada and Japan with her art. Indeed, her work is held by leading institutions around the world, including the British Museum, the Smithsonian, the Albertina, and Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art.

I sat with Matsubara in a white-walled living room lit bright by skylights and large windows. Large, colourful abstract prints — many of them Matsubara’s own — hung around the room. Nearby, a Corbusier chaise, exercise equipment and a grand piano gave the space the feel of a lived-in, multipurpose room. More than the light and colour, what dominated was the smell of katsura wood.

Prints hang in Matsubara’s house, a majestic example of Japanese modernism. 

Matsubara brought us Japanese tea — “the real stuff,” she said with a laugh — and with humour and stylistic flair, told of how this daughter of a Shinto priest ended up an eminent artist living in Southern Ontario.

Matsubara grew up in Kyoto during the Second World War. Given its cultural treasures, the ancient city was one the Americans spared from bombing. But Matsubara remembered being in Nagoya as a child when the bombing raids started. The family evacuated to the deep country, passing trucks full of dead bodies.

“A B-29 (bomber) was the first thing I started to draw,” she said. “When the bomb came down, it looked like fireworks to a child.”

In 1957, she enrolled at the Kyoto Academy of Fine Art, where she was taught by the artist Felice Rix-Ueno, who studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna under Josef Hoffmann. Matsubara spoke about Rix-Ueno’s influence, especially her dictum to “respect the material” she worked with.

Carving tools hang in her home studio in Oakville.

Rix-Ueno illustrated this by asking students to bring a piece of katsura wood to class, along with some children’s cutting tools. She encouraged the students to work automatically, hacking away. She then taught them how to print the designs in oil ink with handmade Japanese washi paper.

Then, Matsubara remembered, she told the class, “This is going to be your teacher. This will direct you. That line you could not make with pencil, nor a brush, nor anything. Only a knife in wood could make that. Make use of it.”

Naoko Matsubara’s home is filled with her woodcut prints.

However, this was not yet the moment that Matsubara decided to become a woodcut printmaker. Instead, she said, she was more lost as an artist than ever. Rix-Ueno gave the promising but wayward student some advice: “Go abroad and look back and see what you really want to do. You will find it.”

Matsubara eventually applied and was admitted to the MFA programs at Yale and Carnegie Mellon, choosing to attend the latter on a Fulbright scholarship. There, in Pittsburgh, she immersed herself in an artistic milieu, experimenting with a variety of materials and techniques.

Matsubara works on a piece in her home studio.

One day in 1961, some other students invited Matsubara to a concert; she did not know the performer but decided to go anyway. The man on stage playing a sitar mesmerized Matsubara, who sensed some incantatory power in the music. His name, she read, was Ravi Shankar.

“The next day I went (to my instructor) and said, ‘I would like to make a woodcut of Ravi Shankar. Can you get me some wood?’ I don’t know why I said that, but I wanted it.” Matsubara promptly got a piece of wood, which she cut down and started carving with two tools she had brought from Japan.

“It was so hard, but I tried and tried. Many weeks passed, and then I got ink and washi and printed it. I did two of Ravi Shankar. I looked at it, and suddenly I thought, ‘Isn’t this what I’m looking for?’”

Matsubara had been somewhat resistant to woodcutting. “(Japan) has this long history with it, and honestly I don’t even like most of it,” she admitted. “It was old-fashioned. And yet here I was, not doing a painting or an etching of Ravi Shankar, but a woodcut. I thought it was incredible.” She made dozens of them.

After obtaining her MFA, Matsubara attended the Royal College of Art in London, where David Hockney was a classmate. She travelled across Europe, then got a job teaching at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. All the while she made her work. She brought to the traditionally monochromatic woodcut form an exuberant colourism and an understanding of the emotional and spiritual power of the way colours “speak.”

A poster touts a 1970 gallery show in Boston. 

In the late 1960s, at a Boston Museum lecture on ukiyo-e (woodblock paintings and prints of women and kabuki players), Matsubara met David Waterhouse, a professor of East Asian studies at the University of Toronto. She almost skipped what turned out to be their first date, she told me, because she “didn’t even like ukiyo-e.” Only the promise of free sushi and sake brought her. They married and moved to the Oakville house — one that instinctively “felt Japanese” to her — and had a son.

At first, Matsubara made her work in a small space inside the home, but in the 1990s built a large studio in her backyard. It is a wood-clad building set in dense garden growth, with a shallow roof and a vaulted room with two skylights and track lighting. It brims with framed prints, books and work tables. A daybed by the window suggested that Matsubara could wake, work and sleep once more without ever leaving the studio.

In 2017, Matsubara’s husband died, and she told me that her late 80s have been marked by the loss of friends and colleagues. I tried to offer some meagre words of condolence, but she stopped me.

“All you can do is make art,” she said.

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