Los Gatos Weekly-Times Photograph by George Sakkestad Japanese artist Mayumi Oda sits by her collection of art at Iwasawa Oriental Art Gallery. Female spirituality is theme of exhibit Featured artist is Mayumi Oda By Shari Kaplan In preparation for Iwasawa Oriental Art Gallery's latest exhibit, Women in Art: Japanese Inspiration, which opened last week, owner Kumiko Iwasawa Vadas announced as publicity that "a goddess is coming to town." Goddesses now fill the gallery--on paper, that is--reflecting several decades of work by featured artist Mayumi Oda. The exhibit also features prints, lacquer pieces, pottery and netsuke by nearly 30 artists from Japan and the United States working in traditional and contemporary directions. All of the artists are women, in keeping with the female theme of the exhibit. "I think I always was artistic. I knew I liked it and my mother encouraged me to do it. I knew from an early age--it almost wasn't even a choice," recalls Oda, a native of the Tokyo suburb of Kyodo. She says that as a child, her favorite subjects to paint were fairytale princesses surrounded by flowers and butterflies. In her 1988 book, Goddesses, which contains an engaging narrative and reproductions of many paintings on display at the gallery, Oda writes of one of her earliest childhood memories of drawing. As a 5-year-old, she received a box of crayons that beckoned to her like an intense rainbow. She was mesmerized by the colors as well as the desire to create something with them. That never changed. Now a resident of the North Bay with a husband and two sons, Oda uses a silk-screening process to create voluptuous goddess images in a rainbow array of colors and dozens of poses and themes. Her inspiration for these joyful, liberated and fertile figures comes mainly from old Japanese woodblock prints of traditional Buddhist gods and masculine imagery. "There are just not enough female images this way. I wanted to see it, so I made it. At first I didn't know whether anyone would be interested in these goddess images," Oda says. She began feeling drawn to goddesses after the birth of her sons, she says, when the women's liberation movement was beginning and society was going through great change. "The experience of giving birth and raising children and being an artist at the same time made me realize my own strength and the potential power of all women," she writes in her book. "Deep inside me a voice was saying 'We are strong; we must only realize our own strength.' " To her, she says, the image of the "creator," like the image of nature, must be female. And so she continues to look at male-dominated religious and cultural works of art, or sometimes simply looks inside her own heart, and creates a wellspring of goddesses that, although Japanese in appearance, speak to all. "Goddesses are a projection of myself, my desire and my dreams. They help me to see who I am and who I want to be. Through my creative process, I have been creating myself," Oda says. "Women in Arts: Japanese Inspiration" runs through Nov. 14 at Iwasawa Oriental Art Gallery, located at 75 University Ave. For gallery hours, call 395-2339. [ Back to Contents Page | Los Gatos Weekly-Times Home Page | Archives ] This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, October 21, 1998. ©1998 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved.