PART TWO STONES DURING AND AFTER PRATT INSTITUTE PERIOD 1966-1976

 

During Yuko’s sojourn in Minnesota Yuko worked primarily in abstract geometries or expressionistic abstract forms. However, after leaving Minnesota in 1966 to attend Pratt Institute Graduate School, Brooklyn, NY for her MFA, she developed a different style whose subject matter involved more concrete and philosophical concepts. There, at Pratt, Yuko chose Stone as her subject matter, and applied her own invented technique that has been mentioned previously as “dotism,” to her stone paintings. Yuko states, “…most stones appear to be solid and heavy units, but they are in fact composed of numerous grains of mineral chemically compounded and bonded as solids to form what we see as the stone object. Yuko’s numerous “dots” appearing on the surface of stone depict this abundance of bonded granular minerals in a stone. Yuko’s stones are not copies from nature. She is not a landscape artist. The subject of stone is purely symbolic and imaginative. It is an artistic imagination special to Yuko that derives from an amalgamated philosophy combining Eastern and Western traditions. Yuko says, “ …stone for me exists in the timeless, eternal world. In my stonescapes, monumentally large stones are piled one upon the other, making precarious balance, or falling down, or shooting up into the air. This feeling of uneasiness or instability of movement is lessened by the eternal soft lighting of the atmosphere above, thus creating a tension between stability and instability, tranquility and uneasiness, giving the feeling of expansion and lyricism.” The “expansion and lyricism” of which she speaks is akin to poetry. In fact Yuko both read and wrote much poetry in her lonely hours of study or when not at work painting in her studio. As she worked on her stones, the idea of what they meant eventually extrapolated into the concept of dunes, an extension of the life of stone in another spiritual form or dimension, lyrical, forever changing, like life itself.