A Morning with Takako Yamaguchi, the L.A. Artist We Never Knew We Needed

A Life of Reflection and Artistic Exploration

“Time is the most important thing right now,” says Takako Yamaguchi. At 72, she is experiencing her first institutional show with MOCA, and she feels a sense of urgency to make the most of her remaining years. This realization hasn’t brought her down; instead, it has brought her joy and a renewed passion for painting. Her mind is clearer than ever, and she finds herself eager to spend every day in her studio, surrounded by the white walls of a second-floor space in a gray-blue apartment building in Santa Monica.

From the moment you sit down with her, it becomes clear that Yamaguchi’s reflections on time are deeply rooted in her family. Her mother will soon turn 96, and her father just celebrated his 100th birthday. She is always ready to travel to Okayama, Japan, where they live and where she was born. Over the past few years, she has gradually moved items from their home to Los Angeles, including ceramics. Recently, she has been considering what to do with her mother’s collection of kimonos.

Yamaguchi’s apartment, located just across the hallway from her studio, is minimally furnished. In the living area, there are only three artworks on the walls: two paintings by L.A. icons William Leavitt and Lari Pittman (she traded artworks with the latter), and hanging above her white couch is one of her own paintings of a naked torso, with a breast pressed against neon-yellow plexiglass. She admits that for a long time, she avoided acquiring things, moving frequently, almost every two years. Settling in Los Angeles was unexpected, but she has now lived there for nearly 47 years.

During our conversation, I asked her to share an object that holds meaning for her. She chose a pair of wooden dolls — a girl and a boy — given to her by her father when she was around five years old. She remembers being sick at the time, and the dolls were a rare treat. In postwar Japan, they had little money and few possessions. She shows me a black-and-white photo of herself as a child, holding the dolls on her lap in the sunlight.

The dolls, she explains, don’t directly relate to her work as an artist, as she doesn’t draw on her childhood. However, I notice the lovely kimono patterns on their round bodies, which also appear in her painted landscapes. It feels like an artifact of a time before she left home, before she learned another language and country.

Yamaguchi moved to the U.S. for college, a hopeful time filled with possibility. Her parents encouraged her decision, and she received a scholarship to Bates College in Maine. While they expected her to return home, she sensed she would stay. At school, she tried studying political science or journalism but found the workload daunting, especially as she was still learning English. She took an art class out of curiosity and discovered a love for it. Becoming an artist was a total accident, and she committed to the craft partly as a means to stay in the country — she needed a visa, so she applied to UC Santa Barbara, where she earned her master’s in fine arts in 1978.

Los Angeles, too, was an accident. She thought it would be a stopover on her way back to the East Coast, where “serious” artists lived. “In L.A., you are free to do whatever you want to do, no one cares — it’s scary. It didn’t seem to have much structure. But because of that, I thought, ‘You can’t stay.’” And yet she did. At one point, she started dating a man who lived in Paris, and she found herself split between France, the U.S., and Japan. A friend advised her: “Takako, you need to pick two countries.” She heeded the advice and ended the relationship, choosing the U.S. and Japan. The friend later said he was surprised by her choice — he had suggested keeping the boyfriend and losing Los Angeles. But she couldn’t give up the city, realizing that “L.A. was my identity as an artist.”

In Los Angeles, Yamaguchi can do her own thing. She is “happy to be left alone.” There is less information overload than in a place like New York City. L.A. has the appeal of not being at the center of things, allowing her to work at her own pace. Even though time is limited, she savors working slowly, gradually. Sometimes her husband, gallerist Tom Jimmerson, comes home and is puzzled — the canvas she worked on that morning doesn’t look much different. But she sees a transformed picture in the smallest of adjustments, like the deeper tint of a shadow.

Yamaguchi speaks of her slowness as something almost naughty. In an interview this summer, she described “wasting” time as “a perverse pleasure.” It’s her rebellion against capitalism and the expectation to produce quickly. No other series embodies this more than her close-up self-portraits of her bust, waist, and torso, where she painted each white stitch on a crochet top and each blue wrinkle in the pleats of a skirt — which, like many things she owns, including the black button-down jumper she wore during our interview, is a hand-me-down she continues to wear.

She is now focusing on making paintings that already feel familiar to her, using forms she has repeatedly traced and painted over her career: braids, cones, columns, mounds, loopy waves. Together, these shapes create what she calls “abstractions in reverse” — abstract pictures that evoke natural landscapes of their own. She references Wallace Stevens, who wrote in his journal: “All of our ideas come from the natural world: trees equal umbrellas.” But what if umbrellas, instead, equaled trees? The world of color and shapes — of art — is just as real and lived.

At MOCA, Yamaguchi has 10 whimsical seascapes on view: oceans with golden curtains for skies and purple waves for waters; oceans that could serve as backdrops to the Ballets Russes, with bands of red and white shooting up from the horizon. A month earlier, I had seen a different body of work from the late ’80s at her gallery, Ortuzar, in lower Manhattan: five large paintings featuring allegorical women drawn from the Renaissance artist Lucas Cranach the Elder, each cast in a Yamaguchi landscape of dizzying swirls and gold leaf.

When I ask Yamaguchi what she thinks ties her works together, she says, “They’re incredibly time-consuming and exacting,” and adds with a smile, “they have a contrarian streak.” Her work has often been off trend — always of the future or the past, but never of the present, she says. “What could be more fuddy duddy and out of step than the seascape?” Anna Katz, the curator of the MOCA show, rhetorically asked at the opening.

Yamaguchi delights in her difference and defiance. She is inspired by the Romantics from the late 18th century who painted seascapes, but she’s “not romantic.” She admires spontaneous, expressionistic artists, but she has more of “a cool side.” She tries to “avoid” emotion — “keep it away, out.” When I ask her why, she says maybe she feels “self-conscious,” “kind of inadequate.” She prefers to be in control. But what stays with me after our hours together in her Santa Monica apartment is a softer side, a side that thinks of the passing of time and has held on to her childhood dolls — a side that she keeps private and presumably separate from her work, though even she knows this distinction isn’t realistic. “Emotion has a way of sneaking back in.”

After our interview, I stayed in her apartment while photographer Jennelle Fong took the artist’s portrait. She asked Jennelle to make sure she looked good, but she was already beautiful: elegant in her understated Gap jeans, round black eyeglasses, and neatly trimmed bangs. Jennelle, who had overheard much of our conversation, wondered what Yamaguchi does to relax, given how intensely time-consuming and focused her work sounds. “Baths. And stare at Japanese TV. And wine!” Any cheap wine, she clarified.

I wandered back toward her studio and examined a board pinned with various bits of paper and pictures. There was a news clipping of Yamaguchi when she was younger, posing with a cigarette in front of her painting of a smoking woman. There was a photo of a winding road, and several photos of seascapes. When I asked her about these, she said her husband cuts them out from newspapers whenever he sees them and gives them to her. I think of three paintings from the MOCA show that appear to have smooth, paved roads in the middle of their oceans — oceans to be traversed, traveled. I think of how the only thing separating Los Angeles from Japan, Yamaguchi from her parents, is a long stretch of Pacific Ocean, and how she’s been journeying it most of her life.

When I asked her if living between two places and languages has impacted her art, Yamaguchi said, “I felt like wherever I was, I was an outsider and wasn’t able to fully integrate. And even in my own country, I felt very foreign too.” She added, “It must have affected something in my work.”

When I think of what ties Yamaguchi’s work together, I think of being suspended in time and space, of being nowhere in particular, but of also being pressed up close to the moment. I think of being pulled into focus: before a human body or the patterns of an otherworldly ocean. I think of the embrace of colors and textures and shapes. I think of how accommodating her work is, how she doesn’t stick to a single aesthetic or mode of expression. There is no one way to be.

I told Yamaguchi that next time she needs a bigger show, one that has all her works side by side, to showcase her multiplicity. The MOCA show is just one room. It is part of the museum’s “Focus” series, exhibitions reserved for showcasing emerging artists. “72 and emerging,” Yamaguchi wryly said. Of course, she’s been here — it’s the institutions that are catching up.

As we said goodbye, Yamaguchi said how nice it was to spend time with “young people.” I thanked her for sacrificing the hours from her precious workday. As we walked down the staircase, she waved and called from the railing: “Enjoy your long lives!” A reminder of the gift of time.