Master of Light: Artist Kay Yokoyama

By Alan D. McNarie

Kay Yokoyama seldom seeks the limelight—which is ironic, because her paintings are all about light. A Yokoyama painting will immediately stand out, even if it’s in a wall full of other paintings. Hers is the one that seems to glow.

In fact, Yokoyama might be considered one of the grand dames of Hawai‘i painting, except that she is so self-effacing. The State Foundation on Culture and the Arts has purchased three of her paintings for its permanent collection. Her works have appeared in numerous shows, both solo and collaborative. For years, she’s volunteered at East Hawai‘i Cultural Center and sat on its board, quietly helping to shape the island’s cultural scene.

When Yokoyama paints a “landscape,” it’s equally a skyscape and a lightscape. In one painting, cattle graze in an upland Waimea pasture, washed in pearlescent mist. In another, a misty dawn bathes Mauna Kea—blurring the boundaries between realms until it’s difficult to see where dawn ends and mist begins, mist ends and mountain begins.

“I paint light,” she says. “That’s my main focus. I like bright light, diffuse light, reflected light, light passing through clouds and rainbows, even light through the fog….”

Yokoyama finds ways to make even a sunset fresh. One painting catches a moment when the sun is just sinking behind a dark band of clouds off the Kohala Coast: the sun’s disc is mostly obscured, but rays glint, white-gold, off the top of the clouds, and form a river of light on the ocean beneath. Another painting, set in the ranchland above Waimea, catches the moment just after sunset: an immense, rosy-golden glow silhouettes the tiny figures of cattle grazing along a ridgeline.

Even when she paints people, light plays a key role. Her painting of Swedish-immigrant fabric artist Ragnhild Langlet holds three key elements: the artist, the piece she’s working on, and a work lamp that illuminates both, etching the lines of Langlet’s face with sharp shadows and shining off the rich fabric under her hands. But Yokoyama’s portraits more often celebrate working-class people outdoors. One shows broccoli harvesters at a Waimea truck garden, for instance. These are not “beautiful people” in the classic sense—in fact, their heavy, protective clothing makes them look bulky and hides many of their features—but working in the misty, early-morning light, they’re imbued with a quiet beauty and dignity.

“In the morning sun, the light is cool and the shadows are warm,” she remarks. “In the afternoon, the light is warm, but the shadows are cool.”

Yokoyama has been perfecting her technique for decades. She typically works in pastel or watercolor on paper; her palette holds only the three primary colors: red, blue and yellow. All those subtle hues in the finished works come by carefully blending those three on the paper. She achieves that signature glow partly by “glazing,” applying layer after layer of extremely thin, nearly transparent paint.

“This one, I must have glazed a hundred times with very thin washes of primary colors,” she says of a ranch landscape.

If you ask her about her technique, though, she’ll typically talk not about herself, but about her teachers. Her obsession with light came, she says, “after I started taking lessons from Richard Nelson, because he was always talking about luminosity—how to portray light, to create light….”

Yokoyama has had many teachers and influences over the years: Kalei Lyman, Richard Crawford, Gerald Murai, John Thomas and Jerry Livingston. She’s an inveterate taker of workshops and night courses—not just in painting, but in media as diverse as pottery, calligraphy and fiber arts. Her master’s degree, however, is not in art, but in psychiatric social work, thanks to the influence of another key figure in her life: her father.

“I told my father I wanted to go to art school, and my father said, ‘Be practical,’” she recalls.

Morie Yokoyama was an influential figure for more than his children. He was a leader of the island’s Japanese community: journalist, radio personality, orator and poet. An Issei—a first-generation Japanese American—he took his family back to Japan for an extended stay when his daughter was six.

“My grandparents were having their golden [wedding] anniversary,” Kay recalls. “We thought we were only going to be there for the summer, but we kept having problems. My grandfather passed away, and my mother decided she should stay with her mother for awhile….” Her siblings fell ill with various childhood diseases, prolonging the stay even further. She was nine years old when she finally returned to her home town of Hilo.

While in Japan, she attended school there and won a prefectural student art contest. The school gave her a scholarship for weekly art lessons.

“The school was excellent,” she recalls. “The art teacher was an artist, and the music teacher was a musician.” Ironically, though, the art taught there “wasn’t oriental painting. It was more based on Western principles.”

Back in her home town of Hilo, however, her school had no art teacher at all.

“Of course, when I was growing up in Hilo, there were artists like Hitchcock and Lloyd Saxton, and I used to admire their art hung upon the walls in the library,” she remembers. “But they were not approachable. They were in their own world—famous people. You couldn’t ask them to teach you….”

She still found other ways to pursue her interest.

“I used to enter poster contests, like ‘Fire Prevention,’ ‘Be Kind to Animals’ and ‘Traffic Safety,’” she recalls. And she fondly remembers the encouragement of one teacher: “We had a Miss Bohnnenberg. Rebecca Bohnnenberg. She was always on the lookout for talent among the students….”

Miss Bohnnenberg put Yokoyama to work repairing “Dick and Jane” primers; when an image in a book was damaged, Yokoyama would repaint it. One day, Bohnnenberg arranged with a downtown Hilo department store to literally put Yokoyama’s talent on display: the young artist painted a still life while seated in the store’s front window.

And despite her father’s practical streak, she grew up surrounded by the arts. The elder Yokoyama founded a club for Japanese-language poetry in Hilo. Her mother, Chiyoko, wrote, taught Japanese, and was a talented koto player, who made sure her children also had lessons on the traditional Japanese instrument. Both her father and her mother directed plays. Her sister became a professional musician. Two cousins in Japan were professional artists. Other Japanese artists visited the family when they came to Hilo.

It was not an easy time to grow up Japanese in Hawai‘i. When war broke out, Morie Yokoyama was not interned like many local Japanese community leaders, but he was under constant FBI surveillance. The Japanese school where Chiyoko taught had always displayed both the American and Japanese flags at its graduation ceremony; during the war years, both flags were still displayed, but the red disk that symbolized the imperial rising sun was cut out of the Japanese flag, leaving a huge round hole.

Even after her father persuaded her not to pursue art as a career professionally, she found time to pursue it on the side. While working on her undergraduate degree at UH-Manoa, she also took classes at the Honolulu Academy of Art. While pursuing her master’s degree at Simmons College in Boston, she took night courses in art and took full advantage of the city’s rich cultural life.

“I went down to Beacon Street and found a shop that sold Japanese wood-block prints,” she remembers. “If I’d had more money then, I’d have bought a whole lot because they had piles of them.”

She and her sister, who was also in Boston, studying music at a conservatory, went to concerts together.

“Those were wonderful years,” she recalls.

Her love of art never died during the years when she worked as a psychiatric social worker, first at Queen’s Hospital psychiatric ward and later in Hilo. But her career as a painter really blossomed after she retired as a social worker. Now, her works appear regularly at Wishard Gallery in Waimea and at the Volcano Art Center Gallery, as well as at various East Hawai‘i Cultural Center exhibits.

Her home in Hilo is one of those places where, no matter where the gaze rests, there’s something interesting: a sideboard covered with hula-themed figurines sculpted by Yokayama; a fine tea set she made herself, and, of course, paintings: not just her own, but those of others, including two abstracts by her beloved teacher, Richard Nelson.

“If I’m not surrounded by books, art and music, I don’t feel whole,” she says. One senses that Kay Yokoyama is quite complete in her mastery of the art of light and of life. ❖

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Contact writer Alan D. McNarie at amcnarie@yahoo.com.