Bonner David Galleries | 12/7-1/5 | New York, NY

Figure and Form

Bonner David New York unveils an exciting new body of work by painter Milt Kobayashi

Milt Kobayashi is a denizen of the night. From midnight to 8 a.m. he paints, sleeps into the afternoon and the cycle repeats.

“I always felt my best work was done at night,” says Kobayashi, who has lived in New York City since the late 70s. “I think my body likes the quality of the night air. And when the whole world is asleep, it’s as if I can absorb all that unused energy. My brain is cluttered when I wake up and it has to air out for a while, but when that clock strikes 12, it’s like an alert telling me it’s time.”

In those potent hours of silence and solitude, Kobayashi’s Eastern and Western influences are filtered through a way of seeing the world that is completely his own. On the canvas his perspective takes the form of figures held in fields of shape and color, and who feel both present and absent, familiar and foreign.

Studio Colors, oil on canvas, 19 x 22"

Kobayashi believes that everyone is a prisoner to their particular talent. His was excelling at drawing and he found figures the most challenging way to express that gift.

“Whenever I hung out with my friends, in any kind of social situation, I was very intrigued by the way they always seemed to be looking at things that were not associated with the moment or thinking about something else, or immersed in several things at once,” he says. “I was always wondering what was going on in their minds. I would make up stories of my own about what people do and why, and try to explain it through my compositions.”

But the figures themselves, or the individuals they suggest, seem almost secondary when Kobayashi speaks about what really motivates his artmaking, the zeal in his voice unmistakable.

“They’re very complicated masses of form,” he says. “I don’t see my artwork as scenes as much as I do problems to be solved in composition and shapes—where I put my large shapes and how they relate to each other on a negative space or field…For me it’s always about the art of the art. How I paint form. How I put my paintings together. This is what drives me. My end goal is to perfect my technique and it’s ongoing—a lifetime’s work.”

Very Yellow, oil on canvas, 10 x 10"

Kobayashi is currently chronicling his life’s work thus far. His first memoir, A Search for Poetry in Art, is due to be published in 2024.

As is common with many artists working in the genre of contemporary realism, Kobayashi cites Sargent, Sorolla, Whistler and Chase among his earliest influences, and it was standing before Velázquez’s Portrait of Juan de Pareja that jolted him into leaving commercial illustration to pursue painting full time. But when he practiced his craft by copying their masterworks from books, his eye would translate what he saw into simple, flat-lit shapes in shallow fields.

“I can’t separate my ancestry from my art and how I see the world,” says Kobayashi, a third generation Japanese American. “I like the ways [Japanese woodblock print masters] created their space and placed forms on a flat field. The screen paintings are almost abstract and employ a lot of negative space. They didn’t see the world visually the same way European painters did. I like the way they interpreted the world and try to extend that into my own paintings.”

Primaries, oil on canvas, 10 x 10"

As Kobayashi has refined his technique over the years, the impact of 16th- and 17th-century Japanese art forms has become more evident in his compositions and become something of a guiding ideal. His earlier work was far “brushier” and more concerned with being “flashy,” as young people, artists or otherwise, often are. These days, Kobayashi is refining his work toward the more stripped-down aesthetic of Japanese art. “Over time I’ve matured into understanding that my brushwork covered up the structure,” he says. “I worried too much about how bravura my style was. I still understand form in much the same way but it’s more well-informed now. If you stick your nose in my painting, I want you to see all that I put in to make sure the painting or portrait works. I still identify with the old style and still see a lot of it in my new style—I just want my paintings to have more structure.”

Primaries, an exhibition of exciting and adventurous new works by Kobayashi opens at Bonner David Galleries, New York, on December 7, with an artist reception from 6 to 8 p.m., and remains on view through January 5, 2024. —

Bonner David Galleries 22 E. 81st Street, Suite #1 • New York, NY 10028 • (929) 226-7800 • www.bonnerdavid.com