Japanese Master Printer Uses Wood Blocks To Interpret Native- American Artwork

WALLA WALLA - Side by side, Tadashi Toda and James Lavadour sat silently on pillows on the floor.

The Japanese artist and his Native-American counterpart couldn't speak without a translator. But that didn't hinder their communication.

Beside them hung the products of their complex three-day partnership - two near-duplicate artworks created by the two using tools as different as the languages they speak.

The project was the result of an artistic collaboration arranged by Whitman College associate art professor Keiko Hara.

Hara invited Toda, a master printer from Kyoto, to visit Walla Walla and to "interpret" a painting done by Lavadour, an artist from the Umatilla Indian Reservation.

It is a skill Toda has mastered during decades of work in UKIYO-E, traditional water-based printmaking.

Toda learned the analytical art from his father and worked for years transferring traditional Japanese paintings onto carved wood blocks, which are then applied with different colors of paints and pressed on paper.

Once transferred to blocks, numerous near-identical prints can be made of a painting.

Toda began collaborating with contemporary American artists about 15 years ago as somewhat of a new challenge.

As a printmaker, Toda must try to duplicate the painter's strokes, coloring and mood without the artist's brush or his or her inspiration.

Lavadour, winner of the 1994 Oregon Governor's Award for the Arts, gave Toda advice on the colors to use.

But Lavadour had no input on the blocks, which were crafted in Japan by a carver directed by Toda.

Yet Toda was able to recreate the intricate washes of green, brown and other colors, as well as the complex mood of Lavadour's unnamed painting of a man and a woman.

Toda used 20 blocks and 36 colors to copy Lavadour's painting. Some of his reproductions use as many as 50 blocks and 120 colors.

Through a translator, Toda said he looks for more than the painter's technique when he begins a collaboration. He looks for his or her inspiration.

In Lavadour's work, Toda said he could see a gentleness and sense a longing in the image.

The bashful look on Lavadour's face as he listened to the interpreter's words belied the truth of Toda's assessment.

Toda's visit was sponsored by the Whitman Art Department and Asian studies program. He also offered students lessons on how to make wood-block prints.

For several former Whitman art students who watched Toda's print develop, the collaboration was a lesson in itself.

Suzanne Bybee, a 1989 graduate, marveled at the rapport between the artists.

How did they communicate?

"Art-speak," Bybee said.