FROM TOKYO TO WICKLOW
FOR PEACE AND QUIET
BY PATRICK DUFFY

“What a mistake I’ve made,” reflected Sahoko as she came out of Dublin airport. “The sky is so big and it’s bloody freezing”. That was back in February 1994. Tokyo meant a stressful life as an assistant director for a television company. Most of her working days were spent underwater, taking photographs for research films. She is there on time, when I arrive in the square to talk to her about her painting. Punctuality is an important Japanese trait, as is politeness. She is bouncy and friendly. “I wanted to go somewhere quiet and start back at painting again. I was living with my parents and grandparents, so many people. I liked Ireland for its size.” We arrive at her house on the hill in Wicklow, I look down and see a good day: Wales is visible. As I sit talking to Sahoko Blake (her husband Liam is a photographer) in their spacious wood-floored kitchen I couldn’t but be aware of the quietness, a pleasure away from the noise and turmoil of the city. Looking around, I see flowers so real I feel like touching them, the blues, yellows, greens, reds speak. “The only flowers I paint come from a flower shop already cut, in a vase, so it’s an individual piece. In nature I probably wouldn’t paint them because they are nice as they are and too beautiful and powerful and I wouldn’t be able to show that wildness in a painting,” explains Sahoko. Her charcoal nudes are well known and stand out as exotic especially her Sumo Wrestlers. She has exhibited at The Solomon Gallery in Dublin, Cheltenham in England and the R.H.A. Dublin, Holland, Berlin, Slovenia etc. and most recently Eigse Carlow Arts Festival. She did charcoal on paper for ten years. “In painting the human form, the model is always different, the studio light and also the pose, a model doesn’t have to be beautiful, every moment changes. I am trying to show the model I like anatomical drawings, inside out, I start with bone structure then flesh and finally skin to cover up. Even for a clothed model I would start this way. I like to be like a pathologist,” explains Sohoko who has a fine arts degree from Tokyo University. “I start with dark colours from the sketches then I cover up with toned colour.” I look around the walls of her gallery-like house and see bodies of all ages and tones in different positions. “Its as if the body exudes light,” I comment to Sahoko. “That’s the way you see them,” she replies. She comes from an academic family, with her father and brother being lawyers; she comes third in the family after two brothers. “I couldn’t speak as a child with two elder brothers. I didn”t know when to utter something.” In the land of the rising sun, silence is seen as golden and maybe at this time she saw the importance of the visual which is asserting itself now. “I would like one day to do landscape or other different ideas but I am only 35 or is it 36 so I am still young.” The Blakes have one daughter Hanna. I am a little bit sad leaving a place where the walls talk and at every moment there is a different story. Sahoko exhibits her work at a Figurative Art Exhibition, Dun Laoghaire County Hall, Marina from 21st to 27th May and Mermaid Art Centre Bray from Wednesday 2nd June.