George Miyasaki
Japanese American, 1935-2013
Blue Serene, 1956
Lithograph
_{© George Miyasaki; Courtesy of the estate of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York.}

At the edge of tender blue, a string of rusty-orange brightness pierces the dark of night. Inhabiting the perimeter of American cultural expression of the 1950s, George Miyasaki did not concern himself with place. As a Japanese American child, who had grown up in Hawaii, he moved to California to study at age 18. By 20, Miyasaki had already embraced abstraction, which was hardly an American art form of note, and whose practitioners, the Abstract Expressionist school, were overwhelmingly based in New York. None of this mattered to him. Blue Serene is an expression of color and gesture, fixed to the paper with just three colors printed from lithographic stones. Calm, balanced, and evocative, this work exudes beauty for its own sake, and no other.