Samizu Matsuki

When her husband was sent to Pakistan, Matsuki spent eighteen months with Berry's relatives, where she painted portraits of residents of their remote Appalachian mountain community in western North Carolina.

Becoming less concerned about a resurgence of cancer, Matsuki, who'd become known as "the shark" by friends for her seemingly never slowing down, then worked at a more leisurely pace and stopped entering competitions.

The drawing featured Huber treesitting in an old growth Douglas fir, confronted by two Linn County sheriff's deputies elevated to him by a crane.

Neurological problems that flared up in 1991 while living in a farmhouse in Calvert County, Maryland led to a reduction in Matsuki's painting and drawing efforts for more than a decade.

Matsuki's winning entries at two major New York art shows in 1970 helped rekindle enthusiasm for realistic painting among American artists.

In 1970, Matsuki's painting "Triumphant Return" earned her a Gold Medal at the First New York International Art Show (her first entry in open competition).

Oil on canvas, 50" by 60") Triumphant Return reveals the thousand-yard stare of air force veteran Andrew Delaney, musing among his childhood relics in the Long Island enclave Rockville Center.

In 1974 she won the Grand Prix at the 1974 Locust Valley Art Show, Long Island, New York for her painting allegorizing the recent tank war in the Middle East "ah!".

According to Matsuki her works "integrate the classic Western method of painting with the theoretical propriety of Contemporary Art, including the colour theory of pointillism, multiple focal points of the Cubists, Modiglianni's deformations; Buffe's “Ideosyncracyism" Picasso’s dislocation of perspective, and the dislocation of time and or space of Egyptian wall painting.

Matsuki's "Magical Realism" as she dubbed her painting style, pays close attention to fine detail, with subtly impossible perspectives, triggering an emotional charge to the works' subject matters.

"Triumphant Return" (1970, oil on canvas, 50" by 60") reveals the thousand-yard stare of air force veteran Andrew Delaney, musing among his childhood relics in the Long Island enclave Rockville Center.

The most immediate experience which inspired my theme was the one where I, by chance, attended the yearly ceremony of the local American Legion, Long Island New York, in which the entire procession was conducted seemingly most diffident and eventlessly hastened up way.

Preparation of painting surface was done by mixture of opaque and transparent regular oil color pigments produced by Windsor and Newton and Grumbacher which eventually took the hue of reddish dark brown.

On this prepared surface, of approximately 1~2 mm thickness of the pigment after sufficient dryness was achieved, I first transferred the final sketch of the theme using medium strength charcoal of commercial origin.

Approximately 3 or 4 coats of a commercial brand fixative were applied before the execution of final underdrawing (cartoon) by oil colour, mixture of burnt umber and Prussian blue in various composition ratio for the purpose of shortening drying period, with pure turpentine, as medium.

At this stage the entire effect of the painting still presents monochromatic, relief-like quality, although proper hues were ascribed to the major areas of the composition.

Thalo family was considered by authority such as Ralph Meyer as comparatively safe but not time tested to the perfect desirability, which might take 500 years to complete.

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.

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.

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.

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 In the 1976 painting "Blue Ghost" Matsuki manifests a line in a Russian poem by Esunin.