by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
For February, the month of love, artist David Nakabayashi hung an exhibit of 50 paintings and drawings about knives at the Yale Art Center.
"I was talking to my girlfriend and was like, 'What is it that's happening - how can I describe what it's like to be with you when we're struggling?'" he said. "'It's like learning to catch knives.' And I was like, 'Hmm, I like that phrase,' so I wrote that on the studio wall, and the show evolved from that."
The show, "Learning to Catch Knives," breaks down into several miniseries.
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The oil-on-wood paintings stem from the retablo tradition of the Virgin Mary painted with a knife over her chest to symbolize the pain of losing her son.
"The knife was always this delicate dainty medieval dagger," he said. "When I updated my version, I changed it to a giant butcher knife. That was scary. It changed the whole image."
For one set of drawings, "Be My Valentine," he drew two knives with their blade tips touching at the base, as if to form a heart.
"The dual knives are about romance," Nakabayashi said. "I painted them about a couple trying to get together."
The other drawing series shows three human hands, three Mickey Mouse-like gloved hands, and three balloon hands catching knives.
"That whole idea of learning to catch knives was just a phrase, a metaphor," he said. "But I started thinking, 'How would you do that? How could you catch a knife?'"
Hands run vividly throughout the exhibit, but the painting that began the series, "Military Brat," has two handless people.
"At the end of the series it's all hands," he said. "It starts out with zero hands."
A hairy man with a balloon hand stands on a yellow box while being tended to by a man with no face. A stealth bomber points to the military brat's chest, and a utility knife is aimed at his head. There are thick splotches of color over realistically painted scenes to remind us it's just paint.
"The stealth is, of course, based in Alamogordo," Nakabayashi said. "It strikes me as a perfect knife - it's a beautiful thing. The utility knife is what they used on 9/11 to hijack the plane."
There are also knifeless pieces, like a girl in a bathing suit wearing flippers standing in the desert. Or, the one with his parents wearing one flipper each and floating down from the sky.
"There's my dad who was half-Japanese and half-Hawaiian," he said, pointing to the little black-haired
figure. "And that's my mom, who was an Okie from Muskogee."
For the less knifey selection, he took school assignments and drawings from when he was 12 years old. Behind a veil of paint, you can see a 93 he got on an assignment or his student of the year award he won in sixth grade.
He was 9 years old when he realized he could draw. Nakabayashi is self-taught. He said that plein aire painting helped him finalize his rendering skills, because he discovered that painting is solely about capturing light.
"From 6 to 8, I was drawing epic stick-figure battle scenes," he said. "When I found out I could draw at 9 years old, I've been doing it ever since. And in the last six years, plein aire has totally liberated my painting skills. I don't even have to think about how to paint anymore. I just do it."
"Learning to Catch Knives"
Yale Art Center
1001 Yale Blvd. S.E.
Monday, Wednesday and Friday
1 to 6 p.m.
Saturday
11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Through Feb. 24
