Hiroki Morinoue could be called a homegrown artist. His parents were coffee farmers in Holualoa, the coffee plantation town on Hawaii island, and it was at an art center in town where his talent for drawing pictures was honed while sketching high school friends.
"I have to credit the Kona Art Center and (founders) Bob and Carol Rogers, because without them I wouldn’t have gone to art school," he said. "I really got involved when they opened the art center here."
The result is an internationally recognized career that has lasted more than 40 years and spanned a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, photography and mixed media.
"He interprets landscape and nature in a style that has ranged from realism to abstraction," according to the program to the inaugural exhibit of The Contemporary Museum, which displayed his work among others. "Morinoue has always sought to create work which maintains a careful balance between the natural and spiritual worlds."
Morinoue is the featured artist at the Honolulu Japanese Chamber of Commerce’s 35th Annual Commitment to Excellence Art Exhibition, opening Tuesday at the Honolulu Museum of Art School. The chamber invites several artists to showcase their works at the show. This year they include Sean Lee Loy Browne, Ron Kent, David Kuraoka, Rochelle Lum, John Morita, Marcia Morse, Fred Roster, Hanae Uechi Mills and Doug Young.
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‘COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE’
The Japanese Chamber of Commerce’s 35th Annual Art Exhibit
>> Where: Honolulu Museum of Art School, 1111 Victoria St.
>> When: Tuesday to Aug. 22, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays to Saturdays and 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays
>> Info: honolulujapanesechamber.org Opens in a new tab or 949-5531, ext. 3
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The exhibition is also a contest, with local artists asked to submit works to be judged by a jury, which this year consists of Rod Bengston, director of the University Art Galleries; Momi Cazimero, owner of Graphic House; and noted ceramist Victor Kobayashi, professor emeritus of education at the University of Hawaii.
Morinoue, 65, now has a gallery and an art center in Holualoa and still farms coffee on the property cultivated by his family for three generations. The gallery, which occupies a site where his father once ran a pool hall, is one of the oldest on the island.
"Each generation benefits from the generation before," he said.
As the youngest child in the family, he had more freedom to pursue a career in art, which was not a typically career path for his generation.
"Not at all," he said with laugh. "If you had a high school counselor, it wasn’t even in the back of their minds. They wanted you to become a schoolteacher or some kind of professional."
But Morinoue did get some training from the Rogerses, retired artists from the San Francisco Bay Area who started the Kona Arts Center. With their help he went on to train at the California College of Arts and Crafts, now called the California School for the Arts, and later in Japan, garnering sponsorship from The Contemporary Museum. He visited Japan several times on extended study tours and ended up living there in the early 1980s.
That experience made him realize "the mannerism of how my parents raised us," he said. "The discipline of how they raised us all came from Japan."
It also gave him some new insights into his art as well.
"I think the sensitivity is more about space than it is about form in Japan," he said. "I like that aesthetic, playing with the elegance of space, rather than the dominance of form. I guess that’s more of a European tradition.
"I just came to the realization that it’s a big difference. So if you look at Picasso, you see how big the form and figures are, in contrast to the figures in Japan — the figures are tiny in the midst of the landscape. That’s the difference, playing with the negative space."
Morinoue’s approach to his work is "a lot of experimentation, which I guess is just playing around," he said. "You get to play … with color and shapes and forms, and create a dialogue with various symbols."
Circles figure prominently in many of his works, which despite his origins painting human figures, he considers now to be "the closest I got to figurative forms."
Not only does Morinoue create art, he’s created some of the substances he uses for his artwork. "Garden with Pond II," for instance, employs spackle — the material used to fill holes in the wall — mixed with acrylic paint. The concoction is painted on an old wood block, providing him a colored, textured surface into which he can carve figures such as butterflies or a surfacing fish.
"I just use painters’ tools and large spatulas to apply it," he said, "like putting frosting on a cake."
