“Sometimes you have to take your heart a long distance in order to feel where it truly belongs. Sometimes you have to leave your own country to understand it is your most important place, because you first experienced the atmosphere of existence there. So it seems to me that Okawa Nobuo, who has lived and worked for many years in my own country of England, has discovered there with greater and greater clarity that he is Japanese.

Of course, his subject-matter is almost universal. It belongs anywhere where thistledown blows on the wind or tiny flowers blossom. Nor is it his technique which tells of strong cultural roots, but rather of that international world of graphic art where mezzotint is used everywhere. Yet the spirit of his work is so Japanese that it would not be necessary to be told his nationality to guess it.

Why is it so? It lies most of all, I think, in that intensity of scrutiny which makes these prints so unexpectedly compelling. His scrutiny of the very small and apparently insignificant lies deep in Japanese traditions of contemplation. The prints, indeed, seem like pictorialized contemplation itself. But it is also his sense of space, of emptiness extending vastly and eternally round these tiny points of life in the natural world. These modest flowers, these almost colourless floating seeds, tell with sharp poignancy of the short, mysteriously lonely lives of human beings, as full of meaning to themselves as to those who watch.

Working in mezzotint from dark to light, Okawa begins with darkness and creates in it just enough light to exist by. Unlike his great predecessor in mezzotint, Hamaguchi Yozo, who has revealed unimagined radiance in simple fruits surrounded by the dark, Okawa seems to give shape, and perhaps hope, to the darkness by his subtle intervention.”

Lawrence. R. H. Smith.

Department of Oriental Antiquities

British Museum

1986