An exhibit of the collage prints of Sumako Cohn, “Scenes in my Memory” at Gallery 93 located in the Brookline Senior Center. The exhibit runs through June 30 and can be view from 8:30am – 5:00pm Monday to Friday.

Sumako Cohn – Biography

I was born in a small town in Hokkaido, Japan. After finishing high school, I took a job in the town hall and with my first bonus, I bought a set of oil paints. Shortly after that, I began to show my work in group exhibitions. When I heard that there was an exhibit in Sapporo showing works from Maurice Utrillo, I went to see it. On the same
trip, I also saw another show where I got to actually meet the painter, a white-haired old man. It was deeply moving. On the train ride home, I decided that painting was what I really wanted to do.

I moved to Tokyo in 1968 to study oil painting. Again, my work was in group exhibits, and I got to show Silent Love, which became my original point of departure as a painter. When I moved to Boston in 1976, I brought some sheets of beautiful natural plant-dyed Japanese rice paper with me and put them up on the wall. Most of my works in those days were ink and watercolor pictures of old New England houses. I exhibited these paintings at the Cambridge Public Library. About 10 years later, I noticed that my memories of my hometown in Hokkaido were slowly fading.
I had the urge to do something about that, and for a year I created all kinds of images from my childhood days every time those memories popped into my head.

In 1988, I moved to Honolulu and found myself entranced by the ever-changing colors of the sky and the tropical foliage. I did oil paintings, acrylics, and watercolors based on animals that I had seen at the Honolulu Zoo. I also started doing sketches of musicians at chamber concerts. I had left my cat back in Boston—and as I worked on painted versions of the sketches, I noticed that I gave some of the musicians cat faces. About five years ago, I decided to create a full set of scenes from my childhood, retracing memories that had grown even fainter as the years went by. These became the doll collages that will be on exhibit at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i. 

If I had not come to the United States, these pictures would have remained no more than a set of sketches. As I worked on these paintings, I came were also real points of departure for me. I find myself thinking more and more about our bonds with the past and the almost unimaginably hard lives of earlier generations. Thinking of ancestors I had never met, an uncle who died in the war, and so many others who had given life their all and taken part in so many dramatic events, these pictures became my way of engaging in dialogues with all of them. As I go on creating these pictures, I feel both affection for my ancestors and a wish for the repose of their souls welling up within me.

Although our lives are nothing more than tiny specks in the vastness of the Universe, I have tried to re-create in these pictures scenes from a way of life that can no longer be seen, as they were viewed through the eyes of a girl growing up more than half a century ago in a little town far away to the North.