Tetsuya Noda

Tetsuya Noda (野田 哲也) is a contemporary artist, printmaker and educator.

He is widely considered to be Japan’s most important living print-artist, and one of the most successful contemporary print artists in the world.

He is a professor emeritus of the Tokyo University of the Arts.

Noda is most well-known for his visual autobiographical works done as a series of woodblock, print, and silkscreened diary entries that capture moments in daily life.

His innovative method of printmaking involves photographs scanned through a mimeograph machine and then printed the images over the area previously printed by traditional woodblock print techniques onto the Japanese paper.

Although this mixed-media technique is quite prosaic today, Noda was the first artist to initiate this breakthrough.

Noda is the nephew of Hideo Noda an oil painter and muralist.

Noda was born in the Shiranui Township of Uki, Kumamoto Prefecture, on 5 March 1940.

In 1959, he entered the Department of Oil Painting, Faculty of Fine Arts, Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (presently Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music), and graduated in 1963.

In 1965, Noda completed graduate course at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music.

Noda was a student of Tadashige Ono in the art of woodblock printmaking.

Since 1968, Noda’s works have been inspired by themes of his own life.

It is a visual autobiography and the motif is a comment on his daily life - his family, people he knows, his children’s growth and scenery along his way.

He takes photographs of what he sees and likes, then develops and retouches them with pencil or brushes.

His works are done using materials close at hand.

On the concept of visual autobiography, Robert Flynn Johnson stated, "To think that one's life is important enough to make it the focus of one's art can be an act of pure folly and egotistical pride or it can involve a humbling and sincere self-examination that draw on observation of small universal truths. It is clear that in a career of nearly forty years of creating an artistic world made at paper and ink, Tetsuya Noda has followed the latter, quieter path."

In the age of social media, some critics are quick to see the parallelism of Noda's visual autobiography and popular social media sites.

In 1968, four years after he graduated from the university, he received the International Grand Prize at the 6th Tokyo International Print Biennale; "for the audacious combination of photography with traditional woodblock print."

Japanese art critic Yoshiaki Tono (one of the "three greats" of Japanese art criticism) pointed out that "Where the Pop artists are concerned with America, with the iconography of a particular age and culture, with anonymous colloquialisms, Noda deals with something much more personal. His main subject is ordinariness - the ordinariness of individual people. Warhol's "Jackie" is the face of a whole period in American life. Imposed on it is an image of Americana during the convulsive sixties. Noda's 1968 prints are of a different dimension."

Chieko Tsuzuki of The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo described Noda's works as follows, "The diverse expressions of his works up until the mid-1970s, incorporating a myriad of elements and having a slight tendency to be overly explanatory, were gradually narrowed down. In the latter half of the 1970s, his works were centered around a combination of woodcuts and silkscreens. Through this combination, he increasingly produced works that expressed the expansion of space. Specifically, he minimized the use of subject matter; brought out the effect of light and subtle shading; and created a large, empty space on the surface plane, via capturing the subject from a low perspective. Regardless of their minimal images, his works during this period reveal a further deepening of his expression that enriched the viewers' impression and their lingering memory. In the 1980s and the 1990s, such expressions were further developed to depict works with a stronger sense of serenity and lyricism.

These works differed from any type of independent painting that became complete via what had been depicted on the plane, or from any talkative kind of painting.

Rather, the works of Noda from that era are pictures that utilized printing, with the aim of reaching into the minds and consciousness of the viewers, through their going back and forth between sets of ideas: the usual and the unusual, the individual and the universal, and reality and fiction.

The viewer might also perceive a sense of consciousness to interact with the work, an idea which is shared by much of contemporary art."

Each print is created through a unique and multilayered method he himself developed.

He begins by selecting a photograph, taken on the day of the title, that he manipulates in various ways.

First he adds drawn elements—such as lines or shading—and whites out other aspects of the image.

The altered photo is then scanned in an old-fashioned mimeograph machine, a process that creates a stencil of the image.

Next Noda takes a sheet of handmade Japanese paper which he uses for all of his prints and applies subtle color through traditional woodblock technique.

Finally he silkscreens his manipulated photo over the top and adds his signature, his name along with an inked thumbprint.

On the use of photographs, Noda concluded the difference between his approach to photography and that of the Pop artist, "Andy Warhol used photographs of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Onassis (then Kennedy), but notice that the subjects are famous people, and the photographs themselves had already appeared dozens of times in the mass media. I never use photos taken by other people. My photos are all my own."

In June 1971, Noda married Dorit Bartur, the daughter of Moshe Bartur, then the Israeli ambassador to Japan.

In 1972, their first son Izaya was born in October; and in 1974 their first daughter Rika was born in November.

(S) = SOLO EXHIBITION,

(G) = GROUP EXHIBITION

In the British Museum Magazine, Timothy Clark, the keeper of Japanese section wrote "In nearly fifty years, Noda has created some 500 further works that continue his mesmerizing ‘Diary’ series, using the unique combination of color woodblock and photo-based silkscreen onto handmade Japanese paper that he has made his own. Personal snapshots are rigorously reworked to become subtle mementos of universal significance: ‘what’s in a life?’ we are constantly prompted to ask."

In 2016, a newspaper pointed out "In this era of social networking, it isn’t unusual for our friends to frequently post photos of the mundane happenings of our lives—a laughing baby, a just-read book, our lunch, a selfie—on Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat. But for renowned contemporary Japanese artist Tetsuya Noda, documenting the ordinary details of his daily life is something he has done for almost 50 years."

When asked about how he found his theme; "Diary as an opportunity", he replied, "at the university I was not at all satisfied with the assignment of painting nudes, it did not seem the right way to express myself."

His independent thinking and determination were highly rewarded.

"I started to use a mimeograph cutting machine for the photo images in addition to the woodblock printmaking techniques."

In the video entitled "Making Beauty: Noda Tetsuya", published by The British Museum on 11 October 2018, Noda and Clark discuss the concept and technique used in achieving the look and feel of the Noda's works.