{"id":75036,"date":"2012-12-20T17:32:06","date_gmt":"2012-12-20T08:32:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fukuoka-now.com\/?post_type=feature&p=31548"},"modified":"2017-06-13T12:34:36","modified_gmt":"2017-06-13T03:34:36","slug":"michelle-zacharias","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/en\/michelle-zacharias\/","title":{"rendered":"Michelle Zacharias"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Michelle Zacharias
\nHometown: Winnipeg, Canada
\nIn Japan: 21 years
\nIdentity: Artist and working at Yaskawa Electric<\/p>\n

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Michelle Zacharias is a Canadian artist and has lived in Japan for over 20 years. She works mainly in colored pencil. Although Michelle has often found her intricate and colorful style too conservative for some and too artsy for others, she was awarded a prize last year at the International Exhibition of Art and Design in Kyoto. Michelle maintains that her art has never been commercial or conceptual \u2013 for her, art is about enjoying the work you do. Having grown up in Winnipeg, a real \u201cincubator\u201d for artistic communities, Michelle often thinks about how to encourage artists in Fukuoka to talk and share ideas. She hopes that her upcoming exhibition with Elida Maria Matsumoto at Konya Gallery will contribute towards this dialogue. Konya\u2019s flexible space is the perfect place to display colorful art to stave off the winter blues. The exhibition will take place from 2\/11~2\/17. Make sure to check the webpage for details of an artists talk: http:\/\/konya2023.travelers-project.info\/.<\/a><\/p>\n

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\nMary-Rose Shand and Matt Perkins met up with Michelle Zacharias to discuss art, growing up in Canada, living as a foreign wife of a Japanese man in Fukuoka and more. Read the full interview below\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Why did you choose to work in Japan?<\/strong>
\nGrowing up in Winnipeg, I was in the middle of nowhere. After suffering from mononucleosis (glandular fever) for two years, I just wanted an adventure. I had no money, I\u2019d been a fine arts student after all and being a woman I couldn\u2019t travel alone so I enrolled in the JET program. I was not a Japanophile. Unlike everyone else, I stayed for romance. My husband hit on me in the cafeteria and I couldn\u2019t get rid of him!<\/p>\n

What made you want to study art?<\/strong>
\nTo me Science and Maths are easy. If you can do it you can get the answer. With Fine Arts there is no answer. You have to work at it. I started out taking English and Fine Arts as a double major. But I got tired of the faculty of Education and their \u2018do as I say, not as I do\u2019 attitude. Fine Arts was liberating.<\/p>\n

Do you think growing up in Canada influenced your art?<\/strong>
\nWinnipeg is in the middle of nowhere but it\u2019s like an incubator for its own artistic community. There is a good music scene. Neil Young, the Guess Who, The Watchmen, Crash-test Dummies, they all came from Winnipeg. And there are a lot of contemporary artists mixing different influences. <\/p>\n

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How has your work been influenced by your residence in Japan?<\/strong>
\n People annoy me when they say I\u2019m working in a \u2018Japanese palate\u2019. I have noticed that streets in Beijing look like my etchings. But I\u2019ve never been there. Some of my friends say the patterns in my work remind them of kimono. I can\u2019t see it. I suppose it all goes in and you can\u2019t really control how it comes out. But influence? It\u2019s not a conscious thing.<\/p>\n

How does the art scene in Fukuoka compare to other areas that you\u2019ve lived in?<\/strong>
\nThere is no scene! Japanese artists would say the same thing. One of my friends disagrees with me. She says Kitakyushu has an arts scene. They\u2019re into more video art, the newer trends. But no one really goes in for gallery hopping. I often find that only people you know will come to your exhibitions. Japanese people do not usually check the paper to see what\u2019s showing, pop in, and do the circuit. I don\u2019t know if there\u2019s any sign of that changing. It\u2019s more focused on the community centre. The older people I talk to definitely wish there was more communication among artists.<\/p>\n

What is it like being a female artist in Japan?<\/strong>
\nBeing a woman artist is no different than being any other kind of artist. When you\u2019re with another artist there\u2019s a synergy in the air, you can feel it. But the art world is one of the few worlds in Japan where I have not encountered much sexism. I am part of the AFWJ, Associate for Foreign Wives of Japanese. They give me quite a bit of artistic support too. We have a convention once a year, which is really one big pyjama party.<\/p>\n

Many of your pieces seem very personal. Who do you regard as your audience?<\/strong>
\nI never really thought about an audience. I really just started doing them for myself more than for anybody else. But this time round part of another reason for this show is to connect people. Elida will be inviting a lot of her students. I want to bring some Japanese younger artists and some older artists who maybe haven\u2019t even been to Daimyo. I\u2019d like to get some kind of dialogue between the other artists. In Japan they often work in isolation. With me, because I\u2019m a foreigner, they feel much more open and maybe they\u2019ll start talking.<\/p>\n

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Could you explain the process of intaglio (etching and printing)?<\/strong>
\nI haven\u2019t done it for a while. In Japan, woodblock printing is popular. You make valleys then you put the ink on top of the mountains. Etching is the reverse. You are still making those valleys and they are the lines you end up printing. You push damp paper into those valleys to take out the ink.<\/p>\n

You appear to work in different styles \u2013 do you feel like you\u2019re still \u201cexperimenting\u201d or moving towards one over others?<\/strong>
\nI was in printmaking for ten years. Once you\u2019re a print-maker that mentality stays with you. With etching you\u2019re doing all these little details. I\u2019m still doing that but with pencil crayon. I also do layering. I like pentimento. It\u2019s still my favourite word and I learned it in my first year of art school. You draw a line then you erase it, but part of it liners to create a richer sense of the drawing. That\u2019s pentimento. I\u2019m still experimenting every time I take a pencil to the page.<\/p>\n

Do you enjoy talking about your art? <\/strong>
\nNo. I don\u2019t. I\u2019m not good at talking about my art. I just do it for myself. They\u2019re not commercial pieces. I don\u2019t like talking about it in deep intellectual ways. I work in color because I got tired of blue, grey and navy. The physical process of art just feels good. I didn\u2019t want to give it up. Ink smells good. There\u2019s no use in getting pseudo-intellectual about it. The doing is more important. And the enjoying after.<\/p>\n

For you, where are the boundaries between your work as an artist and your personal life?<\/strong>
\nFrustrated artists will start making fancy dinners, or letting their creativity come out in the clothes they put on in the morning. But no, those dinners are not necessarily art. To me creativity and art are still two different things. People don\u2019t like that differentiation these days, because everybody has to be an artist.<\/p>\n

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Can you tell us a bit about your upcoming exhibition in the Konya gallery? Has it been an exciting space to work in?<\/strong>
\nI love the concept of the building. The landlord has agreed not to knock it down until 2023 so artists can rent a studio for dirt-cheap. Having seen the space again, it\u2019s smaller than I thought but I think my pieces and Elida\u2019s pieces will both look really good there.<\/p>\n

What advice do you have for other foreigners aspiring to contribute to the art scene in Fukuoka? <\/strong>
\nThere are great art galleries. And I\u2019ve heard rumors that there are figure-drawing classes. And for what there is of a scene there\u2019s a teeny-tiny little gallery with a little bar called Art Space Baku that is well respected. But I love Konya and the vibe there.<\/p>\n

What are the best and the worst comments you\u2019ve ever received about your work?<\/strong>
\nA friend\u2019s husband said, after looking at my work: \u2018Oh so you\u2019ve filled in the lines of a coloring book\u2019. On the other hand, the head of my drawing class says things like: \u2018your lines are running across the page\u2019 or \u2018she\u2019s going to be famous one day\u2019. That\u2019s nice, I\u2019ll take that.<\/p>\n

Originally published in Fukuoka Now Magazine (fn169<\/a>, Jan. 2013)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Zacharias is a Canadian artist and has lived in Japan for over 20 years. She works mainly in colored pencil. Although Michelle has often found her intricate and colorful style too conservative for some and too artsy for others, she was awarded a prize last year at the International Exhibition of Art and Design in Kyoto. Michelle maintains that her art has never been commercial or conceptual \u2013 for her, art is about enjoying the work you do. Having grown up in Winnipeg, a real \u201cincubator\u201d for artistic communities, Michelle often thinks about how to encourage artists in Fukuoka to talk and share ideas. She hopes that her upcoming exhibition with Elida Maria Matsumoto at Konya Gallery will contribute towards this dialogue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31770,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_locale":"en_US","_original_post":"31548","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4911],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-people","location-fukuoka-city","en-US"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/fn169-in-fukuoka-michelle-0551.jpg?fit=640%2C426&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75036"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98374,"href":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75036\/revisions\/98374"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fukuoka-now.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}