It was through this process and her exposure to Georgio Morandi at her professor's suggestion that she became interested in the idea of pictorial space which nudged the trajectory of her work away from realism.
[5] In her process of artistic development, Kodama was heavily influenced by the way that Mark Rothko uses delicate color arrangements to express light in limited pictorial space; the scale and the ease with which Robert Motherwell produces his layered textured works.
While her artistic developments had tended towards the abstract, she felt a strong attraction to Tsuchida’s motif of nature and shifted her style once again to the representational but this time in a nature-oriented direction.
[4] Although Kodama states in another interview conducted and recorded in the exhibition catalogue of Primary Field II in 2010 at the Museum of Modern Art, Kamakura & Hayama, that her interest in nature does not directly stem from traditional Japanese depictions of seasons, but that her works often try to capture the different places that her eyes fall upon on the walks she often takes in her neighborhood.
Though the images are common in our daily lives, they are painted in an airy way over a deep expansive background.” [7] In an essay for the exhibition catalogue at Art Site in 1994, Art Critic Yoshinobu Shimasaki establishes that the gradual process of Kodama's shift away from the representational towards more abstract works of forms and colors began in 1988 “the still objects in her paintings began to show a tendency to gradually melt or disappear into the hazy space surrounding them.” [8] Commenting on Kodama's early forays into abstraction, Shimasaki describes her early abstract monochromatic colored surfaces or forms as “masses” that pursue her “interest in the painting space that originates from still life without borrowing the forms of objects from the world outside the painting.” He says that the lines of Kodama's brushstrokes and the “saturation and brightness” of the carefully selected hues in her earlier works portended her eventual transition towards the abstract.
[5] Shimasaki also addresses this shift from still life to the abstract and say that it may seem to be an “orthodox” transition but art historian Toshio Yamanashi, director of the Museum of Modern Art, Kanagawa at the time, in an essay written for the Primary Field II exhibition in 2010, states that rather than a modernist inclination, Kodama's works show a “sensitivity that is receptive to an intuitive perception of nature that can be seen in the paintings of Hasegawa Tohaku of the Momoyama period, which emerged from the maturation of Machi-shu culture (class of local businessmen), and the Japanese paintings of Chikukyo Ono and Tsuchida Bakusen in the modern era.”[6] Both artists were firmly steeped in the tradition of Nihon-ga during the Taisho period but traveled to Europe together and were heavily influenced by the French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements.
Turner to Claude Monet, and the cultural transmission of non-figurative landscapes to Japan during the Meiji Period, a culture in which “Landscape is a familiar subject for the Japanese.” This transmission resulted in “a fading of the presence of art forms such as Chinese ink paintings that influenced the development of Japanese art.” [10] After establishing the premise of the entangled modern Japanese aesthetic between East and West, Igarashi references the 1978 exhibition Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which established the precedent for dividing art into two board categories as “’windows’ that faithfully represent the external world and ‘mirrors’ that reflect what the photographer has sense or perceived in a more Romantic form of expression.” Igarashi extends this broad categorization to the realm of painting and describes Kodama and the other four artists in the exhibition as “‘mirror’ type artists who perceive scenes or landscapes through the filter of their own sensibilities and perceptions and, with concern for elements such as the season, time, or weather, represent them in views wrapped gently in brilliant moments created ... with the artists perceptions, memories or images intertwined.” [10] Regarding Kodama’s production method which embodies this ‘mirror’ categorization, he writes “Kodama takes photographs of everyday scenes and then creates painting by using the objective image of the photograph to re-examine the subjective image in her mind.” Although Kodama primarily works with oil paint, a Western painterly medium, Igarashi places Kodama in the entangled historical context of East and West that he premised in his essay, and says that in her works, “there is an underlying reverberation of the Japanese sense of nature.” [10] Kodama's works were also included in the Monet’s Legacy exhibition at the Yokohama Museum of Art which presented various Claude Monet works and various contemporary artists who can be said to trace his legacy.
The figurative motifs and the inspiration he gained from them were sublimated into something essential and acquired a vast universality through the process of painting repeatedly.” [11] In an essay for Kodama's exhibition in 2018, art critic Toshiaki Minemura relates to Kodama's oscillation between the representational and the abstract to two concepts: the French concept of obliteration, or a cancelation made over a postal stamp to indicate that it has been used; and the Japanese concept of egaki-keshi or mise-kechi, which Minemura defines as a proofreading method that “rather than blacking out erroneous parts, mise-kechi keeps them visible while crossing them out with one or two lines” and the direction translation is “to draw and erase.” Minemura explains that this “act of half erasing and half keeping a visibility” is best achieved with a paint brush: “A wise brushwork can, without obliterating the whole thing, half erase, leave unpainted areas, or let the preceding layers beneath be seen through the brushstroke” which all depend upon “whether the artist can comprehend the significance of ‘half’ that regulates the subtle conversion of visibility and invisibility, presence and absence.”[12] Minemura argues that Kodama’s explorations between the representational and the abstract and natural motifs can be understood within the context of these concepts.