>>> Tim Okamura: Who knows how much time we've got left.
I'm almost fifty at this point so there's not a whole
lot of time to screw around. I've got a lot of important
work that I want to make.
Hi my name is Tim Okamura and I'm an artist working in
Bushwick, Brooklyn. I'm originally from Edmonton,
Canada but I've been in New York City about
twenty-six years and been working hard since the day
I got here. I think my style artistically is
something that evolved in a really organic way.
I was always interested in painting the figure and
working on portraiture from the time that I was young.
My interest was really motivated by making paintings of people
that I hadn't seen painted before. Being half Japanese
and not really having other friends that looked like me
or had the same stories shaped my vision of the world.
Everybody can have a different story and a
different background and look different, but we're all,
there's a commonality. My father is Japanese.
My mother is from Newfoundland.
Her heritage is British. In this day in age we all
have these crazy, complex backstories and all these
different influences. And we're really a product of
so many things. It's quite a package but I'm glad to be me.
Living in a very multicultural city like New York has certainly
had an impact on the work, primarily the people that
I encounter and all the stories that are being told.
I was lucky in my experience growing up that I had a very
multicultural little bubble that I kind of lived in with my
friends and the people that I loved. It wasn't a
huge contrast in terms of that diversity but it
certainly was in terms of the edginess of this urban
environment. I think that I moved to New York at the
exact time where my love of graffiti and hip-hop
was really in full bloom. Graffiti started to
develop from simple tags and started to evolve and
get more and more into designing these complex
letter forms. I wanted to find ways to integrate that
into my work and make it a part of what I was doing.
I was still holding it down in terms of painting the figure
in a realistic way. I also wanted to just celebrate the
positive and celebrate beauty. So my search for that took
me down a particular path. I didn't think too much about the
correlation between me painting African American
women and me not being an African American woman.
I just didn't consider it as being an issue. I think more of
like what's inside this person? What's their spirit about?
What's their energy about? And that's what I try to
connect with. I think that it's interesting though in this
day and age where people want to define you first of all.
I feel very connected to the Japanese side but I also
understand the British side and the Newfoundlander
in my mother and that kind of very rustic sort of aspect
of how she grew up too. It's fun for me to think
about how much of an unusual formula that is
and then the work that I have undertaken.
I think that I have always considered the work to be
mostly personal actually. I think that in the past
also maybe I felt that the work was kind of
conservative in terms of messaging and I wasn't
being overtly political. I think that I just was
focusing on the people that I was painting for
the most part and letting them speak for themselves.
As time has gone on and certainly I think we are
going through a cultural revolution right now.
I don't necessarily feel pressure to get more
political with the work, but I think that I'm more
clear now with my message and that's really one of unity.
When it comes to talking about humans and the word
"race" comes up, it's unavoidable but for me
it's a misnomer. There's really only one race.
There's the human race. Race is viewed in
American culture in a very complex way. I think that
the problem is a lot of people have been
programmed. When you're born, your natural state
of being is what they call tabularasa or a blank slate.
You don't think anything bad about somebody that doesn't
look like you until somebody tells you.
Some of those stories and those things
that are being passed down are starting to fade and
dissipate and I think that some of the younger generation
aren't longer telling those stories to their kids.
I don't have children. I hope to have at least one child at
some point. I think that the path that I've been on has
been pretty intense as an artist. In terms of telling
my children about my identity or who I am,
I'm just going to be honest. I'm an amalgamation of
all these different influences. My parents they never
pressured me. They encouraged what they saw
me gravitating towards and helped to grow that,
but they never tried to force me into a box. As far as
an artist you always want to expose your work to
different audiences and to grow your audience and for
me of course it's globally. I think that the
work is also growing in terms of its content and I
think that naturally that's going to find its
own audience as well. As an artist I want to
challenge people too. I think a good artist has to.
We're supposed to create dialogue.
We're supposed to ask questions. It's going to attract
whatever feedback it does. I can only control the
work and try to do the best work I can.
I'm not going to continue doing exactly what I'm doing
now for the next thirty years. There's more people in
this world than you think who are just into love and
celebrating humans and good painting and good
portraiture and the rest doesn't matter to them.
And that's really encouraging for me because
I meet them all the time. This very diverse group of
people that respond to the work and that's so uplifting for me.
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