Kazuo Nakamura (1926-2002) Canadian, "Sketch VII" Mixed Media on Masonite. An abstract image that combines a cloudy sky with a jaggedly penned triangle over obscured text, and various lines and shapes that suggest order within chaos. Signed and dated '76 at the bottom. On the back is written: "Kazuo Nakamura 1926-2002 CGP-CS6A-CSPWE-P11 Sketch VII - 76 Nakamura." 

Overall Size: 10 1/2 x 8 1/2 in. 

Sight Size: 8 1/2 x 6 1/2 in. 

Kazuo Nakamura was born on October 13th, 1926 in Vancouver, British Columbia, and began his art training in 1940 at the Vancouver Technical Secondary School under Jock Macdonald. His later teen years were marked by the hardship of internment along with 22,000 other Japanese Canadians during World War II, an experience that led him to find an essential emotional escape through painting at the Tashme camp. Forbidden by the Canadian government from returning home to British Columbia after the war, Nakamura moved to Hamilton, Ontario before settling in Toronto in 1947, where he studied at the Central Technical School and became a founding member of Painters Eleven, known for his restrained and orderly approach to abstraction in contrast to other members of the seminal group. He used monochromatic colors and simpler structures to explore the “inner structure” of the world, and his later work became deeply mathematical, featuring laboriously inscribed grid paintings based on the Fibonacci system to find universal order within apparent chaos. After his death on April 9th, 2002 he was made an honorary fellow at OCAD University, as well as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, and today his legacy as a pioneer of Canadian modernism is preserved through major collections and retrospectives at institutions like the Art Gallery of Ontario.

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