Personal Reflections, by Arthur Secunda

In a strangely precognitive way, A Good Morning relates to an experience I was to have about two years after the serigraph was executed in Santa Monica. In 1987 I found myself in Japan on tour with a traveling exhibit of my graphics. Knowing that I was a seasoned traveler, my host and friend, Yasuo Iwasaki, was discrete and clever about introducing me to the intricate complexities of Japanese culture. In Kyoto, he left me alone for over a week at the Kansai Seminar House with his son's bicycle and a host of books and Arashiyama walking maps, and allowed me to discover the incredible beauty of the temples and rambling byways myself. Another time, driving with Yas from Gifu to Fukui-Ken to meet an extraordinary silkscreen printer, Sukeda Kenryo, we passed through fertile green irrigated farmlands and ghost-like hilly, landmasses that linger in my memory as shifting projections and phantoms of 19th century O-Kyo prints.

Nearby, also in Fukui-Ken, the most memorably blurred image-shapes in nature I recall, were on a visit to the ancient Wagami traditional papermaking mill, where I was invited to watch the beating, washing, drying and storage of beautiful papers, performed by extraordinary artisans utilizing virtually the same tools and methods used back in the 7th century. Later, I was kindly asked to make some paper-art using their materials at the mill. Via translators, I explained that I had made paper in France at the famed Richard de Bas paper mills in Ambert, by a method and process no less traditional and beautiful, but as surprisingly different as French cuisine is from Japanese cooking. Afterwards, a host of many persons - TV crews, paper executives, gallery owners, and I don't know who else - moved on to a sort of tea-house tavern down the hill, for jovial toasting and animated discussion, generously including me into their pro and con paper-talk where possible, given the difficult circumstances of language barrier and sake imbibing.

The geographic location of paper mills in ancient times was always dependant on natural water sources and this is why old mills everywhere are in or near streams, fountains, springs, or rivers cuddled into valleys or hewed into mountainous regions where melting snows provide a never-ending gift of water - the liquid magic movement which is, in effect, the soul of paper. Though the composition of A Good Morning was derived from an experimental monoprint in 1985, the final serigraph version was almost a mental photograph of the imagery for me of the Fukui-Ken region, the ribbons of light corresponding to shifting and random passages of time, which I actually experienced in 1987.

A final and formal note of some interest to me in this work is that the mountain shadows are juxtaposed to the forward plane somewhat in the manner of Duchamps descending lady (though his lady is moving across the picture plane while mine breaks the plane in a forward-backward shifting), giving the effect, I believe, of the mountain's shadow changing gears or having just passed by.