Kabuki Geisha Arrives at Baldwin Beach (8” by 10”)
I live and work on beautiful Maui where I’ve lived for fifteen years. I’m a watercolorist and have built my career as a realist painter. For a while I’ve been painting mostly landscape and old architecture around the island. I always look for something unexpected or something that I want people to look at, a little differently, after seeing what I’ve done. I find unobscured views and the old disused buildings, especially from Maui’s closed down sugar mills particularly alluring. A recent trip to the Honolulu Museum of Art got me thinking about old Japanese woodblock prints which I’ve always admired. So I’ve done a new series in which I borrow things from old prints and mostly relocate them to Maui. Kabuki theater of the late 1700s and through the 1800s inspired many prints which featured exaggerated, vivid and expressive portraits of the actors (all men, even the women’s parts). I’ve borrowed from these old prints which I am continually thrilled by. I think I’ll keep going in this direction for a while. Six of my new ones (2026) have been given awards and purchased by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, bringing my total to nine pieces that are now in this permanent collection.