Contemporary Fine Art & Original Prints | ebo Gallery

Joshua Rome Bio

Joshua Rome was born in 1953 in Hartford, CT. and is the adopted son of Broadway composer-lyricist Harold Rome.

At the age of twenty-one, Rome moved to Japan with the hopes of studying Japanese cabinetry. Early on, he met the woodblock artist Clifton Karhu, who befriended Rome and took him on as an apprentice during which time he gained an appreciation for color and paper.

When his apprenticeship ended after three years, Rome continued his studies for another three years at the home of Kuroda Kenkichi, the son of Kuroda Tatsuaki, a Japanese national treasure of lacquer and cabinetry. Following the completion of his second apprenticeship, Rome focused for the next twenty years on creating woodblock landscapes depicting the rural mountains and changing society of Japan outside Kyoto.

Rome has had over seventy-five successful solo shows at premier galleries throughout Japan as well being a regular contributor to the College Women’s Association of Japan show, the premier exhibition of all print mediums in the Japanese print world. Rome has also had numerous solo shows in New York, Cleveland and San Francisco. His works are found in numerous collections including the Library of Congress, Washington D.C., USA, the British Museum, London, England, the New York Public Library, New York, USA and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, USA

Joshua and his family returned from Japan in 1998 and now reside in Vermont, USA.

PRINTS CAPTURE THE REAL JAPAN

When Joshua Rome first came to Japan in 1973, he landed in Tokyo, “looked at all the Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Baskin-Robins,etc.” and as he tells it in the postword to his collection of works - “started asking myself, so where is Japan?”

He did not find it in Kyoto where he soon saw that “the tranquility of the temples and their gardens was totally antithetic to the world outside.”

And he certainly did not find it in Buddhism. “I am sure that if Dogen, Shinran or Nichiren were to see a Buddhist monk behind the wheel of a Mercedes Benz, they would be as appalled as I was shocked by the dualistic nature of modern Japanese Buddhism.”

Then - by now living in the outskirts of Kyoto - he began to realize that Japan was all around him: in the rice fields. in what was left of agrarian land, in the people who lived on it. “ Farmers after all, can survive without cities and all they contain, but cities cannot survive without farmers.” He had found not only his real Japan, but also his true metier.

For the past 20 years Rome, living with his wife and family in a hamlet of twelve households in the hills northwest of Kyoto. has chronicled the fields, the paddies, the farmhouses of his neighbors. His medium is the traditional woodblock print, a discipline he learned by studying under the Kyoto printmaker Clifton Karhu and by working with fellow artist Daniel Kelley.

Other influences have been, according to Rome, not only Monet - with whom he shares both color values and temperament - but also the even now neglected modern print master, Hiroshi Yoshida.

Like Yoshida (and Monet as well), Rome groups his scene with a precision that renders the composition as spontaneous and “natural” as its subject.

This presentation which respects the nature of the empty field, the abandoned farmhouse, the snow piling on an anonymous rural roof, thus reflects the concern through which Rome has, over the years, adapted his means to the needs of his subject.

One of his first discoveries was that “Echizen washi (paper) is highly over rated” and that hand made long fiber paper was best for his subject. Another perception (one which quite contradicts contemporary practice) is that due to the unevenness of this paper, “each print will be slightly different, with unique qualities of its own.”

Rome also differs from some contemporary printmakers in that he himself performs all the many steps required in each print. The classic masters not only had printers, they also had carvers; some modern artists do not themselves print their blocks but entrust the job to professionals.

Rome’s prints, however, are all handmade. This means much more variation. He can for example and does, cut the blocks differently during the printing. “I just start the edition with an image of what I want in my mind and work with the idiosyncrasies of the materials to form that image.”

When the scene, the block, and the nature of the paper demand, Rome’s printing techniques can be highly expressive. One of his means is a burnishing with the baren that results in the grain of the block showing through the paper. Depending upon the amount of color used used on the block, the result can create the kind of atmosphere so admirable in the works of Yoshida. It is a kind of smokiness - very fit for autumnal scenes amid the fields, as though the very air had weight.

This fitting and startlingly beautiful effect is also created through deliberately limiting color, and then pushing what color is used to its limits. Wabi like in its intention, this limiting to the necessary not only serves well the everyday nature of the subject, but also creates a kind of haiku like sharpness of profile.

Rome’s piled-up snowy roofs have a real heaviness, etched as they are against the nocturnal sky, and this is partially because weight is created by the limitations of two colors, rubbed to their limits, and a lot of white.

This purposeful restriction of means has resulted in more and more atmospheric prints. In Rome’s many snow scenes for example, the gomazuri printing technique creates veils through which we view only what is necessary for us to see. Now, when he speaks of using fewer blocks and colors, this fruitful simplicity can be seen as definitive of his art.

This combination of a nostalgic search with keen critical observation, this description of a layered and atmospheric beauty delineating the square cut-forms of the everyday rural scene, constitutes not only a reconstitution but also a recreation. The real Japan has been found.

by Donald Richie - THE JAPAN TIMES May14.1996

TOTAL IMMERSION

The people of Japan regard Koizumi Yakumo as one of their own, Koizumi the family name of his wife assumed on change of citizenship, though abroad he is best remembered by his former name, which he retained as a writer in English - Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn’s retelling of Japanese gothic folk tales is the basis for his literary fame, through which readers abroad were introduced to quaint facets of life in this country.

Hearn’s feel for the Japanese psyche was total though, influenced by his own predilections, perhaps he may be faulted for depicting the Japanese of his day as too obsessed with things occult. So purple are his tales of the world of ghosts and spirits that one wonders if they might not all be partly responsible for misconceptions still given some coin today - that the Japanese are inscrutable and their ways mysterious.

………..(H)e finally became disillusioned with Japan,…… much of his dissatisfaction stemming from this country’s rapid industrialization. Yet such progress was inevitable; Japan, isolated from the world for so long, had a lot of catching up to do.

Still, one can sympathize. Ugliness came with that advancement; pollution and urban blight the unfortunate byproducts of each new machine. Smokestacks and jerrybuilt factories were to mar not only the landscape but also its ecological order.

Are the any Lafcadio Hearns in Japan today? I think so, rare the foreign resident who hasn’t come across somebody living as the Japanese and immersed in their yeasty culture. Not all are writers, they are found pursuing any number of fields; some studying zen or judo or ikebana or what-have-you though they do share one thing in common - an immense contentment at being here. However humble their circumstances, this satisfaction sustains them and, in turn, pervades whatever they do.

In the field of art Joshua Rome, an American, comes to mind. He and his Japanese wife live close to nature - on a mountainside overlooking Kyoto where, away from distractions, he creates woodblocks. Some may be familiar with his work, the College Womens’ Association of Japan having exhibited his prints in their annual shows.

Like Hearn, he came as a visitor and stayed, sating a fascination that appealed, in his case one that involved his hands, the crafting of Japanese woods into furniture. An apprenticeship under a Kyoto woodworker followed, his love of wood ultimately leading to the making of woodblock prints.

It is an ongoing, consuming passion. A decade has been spent in the hills of Kyoto where he continually hones his craft. This artist did not find Japan; Japan found the artist.
That the prints of this talented American reflect, both texturally and visually, the sensitivities of a fine Japanese artist is no anomaly. His rural scenes, his Kyoto rooftops breathe of the real stuff. Like Hearn in literature, Rome’s accomplishment in art is the result of total immersion. Yes, it has taken time and sacrifice, but to achieve authenticity allows for no other way.

from “On The Road with Joe Grace” - MAINICHI NEWS PAPER June 22, 1984

DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH

Joshua Rome was born in New York City, the son of a Broadway composer and a novelist in 1953. Maybe it was bright lights and big city that taught him to love wild things - but a back road in the rice fields somewhere out in central Honshu seems a long way from the jungles of 5th Avenue in Manhattan. But then Rome is not your average New Yorker. He is a print maker now and a farmer ( the order’s not important ) - and the images he creates of the Japanese countryside are as direct and unpretentious, as genuine and instinctive as the artist himself. He paints what and where he lives - down the same secluded mountian roads, under the same thatched rooftops, with the same unvarnished farm folk always in the background.
Arriving in Kyoto in 1973, he began - without knowing it - to change his whole life. What started as a mild case of interest in a different culture (and a long time perchant for making things out of wood) turned into a lifetime pursuit. As an apprentice for three years to Kenkichi Kuroda, One of Kyoto’s most prominent craftsmen, he learned to respect the quirks and moods of wood, tampering with its limitations, tinkering with its possibilities. This led him to explore the use of a wide variety of Japanese hand- tools, including the type of chisels employid in making woodblock prints. As so often happens in Japan, what you look for is seldom what you find, and what you find is often yourself. For the first time ever, Rome found himself intrigued with the idea of color and line - and began making woodblock prints.

If Josh had stayed in the city, his work - and his life - would have turned out much differently. His move to a farmhouse surrounded by ricefields in the mountians North of Kyoto cvhanged more than his theme. Perhaps it was the isolation, perhaps the clean air and country living (he and his wife Michiko grow all their own vegetables) - no doubt his ricefarmer neighbors have given him far more than gardening advice - a glimpse of Japan at the core. Here in the countryside the traditional culture - undisturbed and undiluted - lives on.

Rome’s recent prints have a poignancy about them, a hint of “ pending doom”, as the artist himself only half-jokingly describes it. Even the remotest areas of Japan face development these days. One of the villages he portrayed in a series of prints last year has now been eaten alive by bulldozers to make way for a new dam. The gray drizzle of spring rain on thatched rooftops, the heavyness of snow on sagging eves, and the permanently bowed backs of the farm wives harvesting rice - in all thes images, his concern for the loss of a simpler way of life comes through clearly. He can do without the pavement , the machinery, and chemicals just as they did, and sometimes still do.

The paper on which he makes his prints is hand made washi from Echizen, one of the most famous papermaking towns in Japan. But beyond his knowledge of wood and fine materials - beyond even the importance of his subject matter - what distinguishes Rome from others who work in the same veinis the fact that his art only starts with such techniques and images, it doesn’t end there. His use of color and texture shows a sence of place far more intimate than the literal imagery that is his vehicle. Subdued undertones and blurred distinctions suggest what it really feels like to spend time, lots of time there.Life here is gray and rough-hewn, introspective and melancholy. You experience the cold of winter - and of isolation - in his work, not just the charm of a rural snow scene.

What’s New York about Joshua Rome? Perhaps his willingness to to try things. Just as with his subject matter, his traditional techniques are just a starting point. He breaks a lot of rules - some premeditated, some with the recklesness required to invent things. Rather than leaving the actual printing to an assistant as so many mordern printmakers do, Rome completes the whole process himself. “ I learn things that way,” he says. “Sometimes the biggest ‘mistakes’ turn out beautiful.” And even the oddest of paths can lead home.

by Diane Durston