East-West Equipoise

The distinguishing mark of such leading Pacific Northwest painters as Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and Kenneth Callahan is their ability to mix Zen with zest, give an Oriental slant to their Western vision. Now a major new artistic talent, who arrived at the East-West meeting point by a different route, has appeared among them. The newcomer: patient and painfully modest Paul Horiuchi, 52, a Japanese-born American who for years made his living as a railroad foreman.

Horiuchi's arrival after years of obscurity (he still runs a small Seattle art shop for a living) was dramatic. At his first one-man show in May 1957 at Seattle's Zoe Dusanne Gallery, 22 of his 24 casein and tempera paintings on rice paper were snapped up by collectors. He was honored with a two-month-long exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum this year, will have a one-man show next fall in London. Seattle Museum President-Director Richard E. Fuller, asked to pick two favorite paintings from his area for Stanford University's "Fresh Paint-1958" (now on show), chose a Horiuchi, and said: "Only a man versed in the beautiful calligraphic writing of the Orient on the one hand, and well grounded in the values and methods of Occidental 20th century painting on the other, would have conceived of such an expression."

Such praise makes Horiuchi's eyes brim with gratitude. His early years were difficult and lonely. Trained as a child in Japan in brush and sumi, he came to the U.S. with his family at 15 and settled in Rock Springs, Wyo., where he got a job on the Union Pacific and learned western technique from a visiting WPA art instructor. Two months after Pearl Harbor he was fired, ordered to quit his company house within 24 hours. He burned all the possessions he could not pack into his jalopy and trailer, took to the road with his wife and two sons, wandered for a year before he got a job as a railroad car inspector. "But somehow I paint," he recalls. "It was the only thing that keep me go."

After World War II, Horiuchi made his way to Spokane and Zen Master Takizaki, who had greatly influenced Mark Tobey. His work became an exciting blend of abstraction and traditional Japanese painting. At his best, Horiuchi manages to combine a sense of the mysterious depths of an ancient heritage (often suggested by weathered scraps decorated with archaic Japanese calligraphy) with moody, grey and color-flecked images of Pacific landscape, mists and rain. Having attained a point of equipoise between East and West, Horiuchi's goal is "to impart something of the peace and serenity of an Eastern memory into the vital and shocking life of a country I love very much, the United States." Among East-West Painter Horiuchi's most enthusiastic fans: West-East Painters Tobey and Callahan.

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