Naoko matsubara biography of michael

Matsubara Naoko (松原直子) was born in 1937 in Tokushima Prefecture, Shikoku, an island on the Inland Sea. Her father became the chief priest of the Shintô shrine Kenkun Jinja in Kyoto. She graduated from the Kyoto Geijutsu Daigaku ("Kyoto University of Applied Arts") in 1960 and then studied at the School of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, where she received an MFA.

She also spent a year at the Royal College of Art, London. She lives in Ontario, Canada.

About her early prints, Matsubara once said, "I need great strength, great physical health to arrive at clarity in my mind for a new work.

That is the most difficult and the most challenging part. Each new work must have a freshness and meaning — or it should not be made." One of the most important influences upon Matsubara was Munakata Shikô, a preeminent artist of 20th-century Japanese printmaking.

In 1962, after she sent him some of her woodcuts for his examination,