Oil and Water, East and West: Contrasting styles pull Satoko's paintings in distinctly opposite directions

IF YOU'VE BEEN a fan of Satoko's watercolors for the past several years, you may be surprised to see just what the Eugene artist has been up to lately. The large, languid watercolors for which she has become well known in town - and, more recently, abroad - are light, bright, loose and flowing. Awash in color, they present an uncontrolled explosion of hue and emotion, as easygoing as a spring morning or a warm summer night. They are, as she says, essentially Asian in character - of the moment, perhaps, and evanescent.

Over the past three years, though, Satoko - she goes by the single name as an artist - has returned to the medium she first studied as a young woman in Japan, European-style oil painting.

And what a change she has wrought. Compared to her watercolors, Satoko's oils look dark, constructed, almost ponderous. Where once there was flow, you now see deliberation and intent. Instead of happening in the moment, they are deeply rooted in history. Satoko's new paintings are as different from her previous work as a medieval cathedral is from the natural landscape on which it was built.

That's the most obvious duality underpinning "Duality as a Whole," a delicious show of the Eugene artist's work that continues through Feb. 2 in the art department gallery at Lane Community College.

At the age of 47, the artist herself is part of the duality represented in the show. She is a Japanese woman living in the United States. Educated on both U.S. coasts, she is an artist successfully making her way in a world largely indifferent to art. Satoko Motouji lives surrounded by art in a small house in south Eugene. On her wall hangs a drawing by contemporary Chinese artist Wang Gong Yi, for which she paid "too much" money, she laughs, at White Lotus gallery. Leaning against one wall is a wooden panel by Oregon carver Roy Setziol. In the kitchen are a couple of framed pastels done by a much younger Satoko.

She asks a guest to remove his shoes and offers a pair of slippers. She produces a pot of tea and a plate of cookies - both American and Japanese.

GROWING UP in Kyoto, Satoko didn't plan on being an artist. She enrolled in a vocational high school, imagining that she, like her friends, would be a secretary or other office worker. She only applied to university, she says, laughing, when she realized it would be a lot less work than an office job. Ill-prepared by her high school curriculum, she took the stiff entrance exams, failed, studied, took them again - and got in. Satoko studied English literature and the poetry of John Keats; her thesis was on the Romantic poet's idea of "negative capability," or the ability to accept mystery and doubt in the universe.

"I thought it was very Asian," she says.

Japan has some very Western art traditions. As the country opened its borders to the world in the late 19th century, Japanese artists traveled to Paris to study art, learning under the Impressionists. They brought home a strong tradition of European oil painting that continues in Japan today. Although she had always enjoyed drawing, Satoko felt she couldn't study art at the university; her parents would think it too impractical. Instead, she signed up for private lessons with an older artist who lived nearby. He taught in the classical European style, starting off with drawing from plaster casts. "I did drawing - only drawing - with him for two years,' she says. `And then I started to study with his assistant. I started to paint with oil. And on weekends, I went back to his studio and I took his wife's classes."

Satoko still had no intention of becoming an artist. "It is difficult in Japan. Kyoto is saturated with artists, but the majority are designers in kimono. They paint on kimono. That's how they support themselves. There are only two or three I could name who can support themselves as an artist." After graduating, Satoko worked in an import-export firm in Osaka, doing office work and using her limited English skills on the Telex. "I learned how to make tea for everybody else," she recalls, "just like (at) any other old Japanese company."

And she kept painting. "I was a Sunday painter."

After three years, she knew she needed to move on. She was 25 years old, living with her parents, commuting to a job that would be essentially the same in 20 more years. Without telling her parents, she applied once more to universities - this time in the United States.

ONCE MORE, Satoko didn't decide just yet to be an artist. She knew she wanted to paint, but couldn't quite absorb the idea of becoming a painter. In 1980, she arrived in Eugene to begin work on a second bachelor's degree, in art history at the University of Oregon. She studied American art of the 1940s and '50s, the vast creative explosion that moved the world's art center from Paris to New York. She learned about abstraction and admired the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. "I wanted to really know what was happening in this country artwise," she says. "I had no idea about American art before I came."

For her art history degree, she was required to take two studio classes. She chose drawing. And, as she says, "just kept drawing." She also painted, and by the time she got her bachelor's degree, she had assembled enough of a portfolio of work to apply to a master of fine arts program - in which she would finally officially study painting - at the University of Massachusetts. At Amherst, she came under the influence of John Grillo, a painter known for his intense use of color.

"I looked at his work,' she says. `It was so bright and brilliant, not conventional watercolor. I was so fascinated by the color he used. So that got me interested in watercolor."

It would take another 10 years for her watercolors to mature. "After graduate school, one gallery on Cape Cod started to carry my work,' she says. `I would send pastel work and oil and watercolor. And they would say, `Send us more pastel and oil.' I liked the process, but I didn't have strong pieces coming out." Then married to a Eugene businessman, Satoko returned to Oregon after getting her master's in 1985. She got a part-time job teaching art at Lane Community College, where she now teaches full time and struggles to balance the needs of teaching with the demands of painting.

She is passionate about the need for art education in society. "Art-making requires discipline," she says. "Mozart said that one had to practice every day. One has to keep working like a craftsman, so one can capture moments of creativity and execute worthwhile pieces of art." Every year that she has been there, she says, LCC has faced the prospect of budget cuts for the arts. "Art can teach an essential humanness - love, compassion, empathy, etc. For example, our vocational program provides people with skills to get jobs. Art can teach people strength to go on with their lives with hope when they experience disappointment."

NOT UNTIL 1993, with a show at Salishan Gallery near Lincoln City, did her watercolors begin to attract attention. Satoko's watercolors are fluid, uncontained, unrestrained. She uses intense color, allowing it to wash over the paper in what seem to become geological shapes of mountains and plains, with unlikely brilliant skies above them. This technique isn't that easy to do, and she says it took her years to perfect her technique. "You put water on paper. And then you throw color, and you just watch what it does. But if you try to control it, it never works. You have to just stay in the flow and let it just move by itself and then a wonderful thing happens."

In 1994, Satoko traveled as a tourist to Siena, Italy, where she was entranced by everything from the centuries-old architecture to the climate. Tuscany's hot, uncomfortable summers reminded her of her home in Kyoto. She stayed and painted, and has returned each summer to paint in the Italian countryside. Under the auspices of the UO, she founded the Siena Art Program and teaches students most summers. It was there she again picked up oils and became focused on the duality in her art, balancing oil and water in aesthetic opposition between West and East, logic and intuition, control and inspiration.

"Painting watercolor is like experiencing Asian philosophy, Taoism or Buddhism or whatever they are,' she says. `Being in harmony with nature, you really have to respect nature as a human being. And watercolor is like that. You have to respect the medium and go with the flow. You don't really control the medium, you can just be a part of it, and respect the way it works, and the way it moves. And then maybe you create something.

"Oil is much more logical. Oil makes the pigments stand, instead of spread. So that is the brilliant invention of the European painter, to make it stand, so you can rework and rework and rework over time. Watercolor dries in two hours. Oil doesn't dry for a week, so you can be very methodical in terms of constructing the image.

`And that is an embodiment of European philosophy, approaching life in a logical way."