For ten years Masako Kamiya has developed an approach to painting that is hers alone. She constructs tiny towers of gouache, an opaque watercolor, one dot of paint at a time. When a dot dries, she adds on top of it another dot. When the painting is finished, she will have done this maybe 10,000 times. Her paintings are stunningly complex, and their transitions of color are ravishing, especially on close inspection.

The evolution of her paintings over the past decade – the configurations of the “drawings” formed by her little towers; the daunting growth in the scale of her work, now almost four-feet tall – can be seen in a mid-career retrospective of some twenty paintings that opened recently at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham and runs through May 16, 2010 A full view of her newest work is given in Masako Kamiya: New Work, 2009-2010 at Gallery NAGA from April 3 through May 1, 2010.

During the past several years Masako Kamiya has attracted much attention in the Boston art scene. Her taciturn accumulations of thousands and thousands of daubs of paint, the tiny stalagmites of paint that spike forward, strike many viewers as exhilarating cascades of visual information.  In her newest paintings the topography of her surfaces has changed from the dense coverage of its overall surface, which she’s used for years, to lacy and airy compositions.

“I’m really interested in the highly developed textures,” Kamiya says.   “The perceptions are very different as a result.  You have to walk through the surface to perceive the color relationships, more the way you experience sculpture.  For me, it’s almost more like making an object.  It’s an interesting question.  I am painting, but I’m also making an object.”

In the November, 2002 issue of Art in America, Ann Wilson Lloyd wrote about Kamiya's work: "These works have an interest beyond color theory, optics and their tender, crusty surfaces: they convey intense emotion. One suspects that Kamiya has an intimate, near obsessive relationship, akin to Yayoi Kusama's (if not as neurotically impelled), with each tiny dot and gestural action. Ultimately, in Kamiya's vibrant miniature worlds, viewers are forced (as she lyrically puts it in her artist's statement) "to come close to the surface to recognize how each dot vulnerably trembles within a pool of similar gathering."

Born and raised in Japan, Kamiya pursued her art training in the United States, at the Massachusetts College of Art and at the Montserrat College of Art, where she is now an assistant professor.

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