Studio Space premieres tonight!

“the song of the creek” is 8x10, made of painted papers on birch wood panel. You may see me working on it in the “Women of Washi” episode of Studio Space, which airs tonight. The original collage went to a new home this past Sunday. 

With the highest per capita number of artists in California, Humboldt County is an exceptionally creative community. Our local PBS station, KEET-TV, has produced the second season of a fascinating series on Northern California artists called Studio Space. I’m thrilled to be one of the two featured artists in the episode that debuts tonight. 

The 28-minute segment, called "Women of Washi," profiles Lori Goodman and me working in our art studios and talking about our backgrounds, inspirations and processes. Humboldt folks, tune in to KEET at 7:30 Pacific time tonight, Thursday, May 5 for the world premiere.

People everywhere can also watch it online for free for the following three weeks. After that, it will go behind a paywall for non-KEET members. See Studio Space for all episodes, featuring a great diversity of artists, mediums and approaches.

Since Thursday is also Cinco de Mayo, our extended family is planning a viewing party with tacos and margaritas. I haven’t seen my episode yet. We’ll either celebrate my 14 minutes of fame or drown our sorrows if I bombed!

my Spanish starting to flow margaritas

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It was great fun to do my first public Makino Studios event since 2019. Many thanks to all who came out to the Pizza & Pottery Festival this past Sunday! 

Makino Studios News

Award for Water and Stone: The Haiku Society of America announced today that my book of art and haiku, Water and Stone, has won Honorable Mention in their Merit Book Awards! The book is sold online here, on Amazon and in local stores.

Artists’ Resilience Grant: The Ink People Center for the Arts has just awarded me a grant from their Funds for Artists’ Resilience. I’m very grateful for this pandemic-era support, made possible by the Humboldt Area Foundation and the Wild Rivers Foundation.

Solo Show in September: The grant will help me to create new work for a show of my collages, to be held at Just My Type in Eureka, California in September. Stay tuned for details!

ukiaHaiku Festival: I’ll give a brief presentation and reading at the 20th anniversary of this haiku festival in my hometown of Ukiah, CA. The event will include a dance performance, koto and shakuhachi music, and songs performed by the Haikukuleles! I’ll also have my books, prints and cards for sale. The ukiaHaiku Festival is free and takes place Sunday, May 15 at 2 p.m. at the Grace Hudson Museum. Attendees will have the chance to read up to three of their haiku.

Writers Read: On Thursday, June 23 at 7 p.m., I’ll be back at the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah as the featured reader in this long-running series, with a slide show of my haiga (haiku art) as well as a table of my art and haiku wares. Open mike follows.

New notecard sets: By popular demand, I’m offering boxed notecard sets again, including a new animal series as well as an updated landscape series.

A few cards suitable for graduation.

Prints to order: I’ve recently posted several of my designs on Fine Art America, where you can order them the size you want and even have them framed. If you’d like a print of a piece in my gallery that you don’t see on FAA, let me know so I can post it for you.

Graduation: Commencement for many schools is Saturday May 14 and others soon follow, so make sure you have cards for your grads! Yes, I’ve got some options, see left and shop all cards.

North Coast Open Studios: After a two-year pandemic hiatus, this event is taking place again June 4-5 and June 11-12 at artist studios around Humboldt County. I’m not officially part of it this year, but am always happy to give studio tours by appointment.

What we've survived

“bright green needles” is 8x10 and is available as a greeting card. © Annette Makino 2021

Well, it feels like we are finally turning the corner on the COVID-19 pandemic. My family is fully vaccinated, along with 40% of Americans, and I feel an expanding sense of relief. 

My husband, son and I took advantage of our newfound freedom by driving to San Francisco last week. I have been craving artistic inspiration, so we hit two museums and two galleries in three days. We also visited the Japanese Tea Garden, the new Salesforce Park, Chinatown, North Beach and the scruffy, artsy SoMA neighborhood, walking eight to ten miles every day. 

San Francisco
steep streets spilling
into the bay

It was rejuvenating to leave home for the first non-essential trip in fourteen months, and to experience the energy of urban life. Outside many restaurants, pleasant outdoor booths line the streets in place of parked cars. Some eateries offer customers QR codes to snap with their phones instead of touching old-fashioned paper menus.

city maze
falling in love with
the GPS man

But we were shocked to see how hard the city has been hit by the pandemic. Whole blocks of Chinatown are mostly shuttered and many restaurants have gone under. Even big national chains in prime spots have closed, like the giant Uniqlo and Gap stores near Union Square. The tourists are slowly starting to return, but it could take a long time for downtown to recover. 

Back home, we are not out of the woods. Though Humboldt County fared well earlier in the pandemic, now with the spread of the more contagious B.1.1.7 variant, we have the worst COVID-19 case rates of all 58 California counties. The deaths and lingering side effects will haunt us for a long time, as well as the lost livelihoods and failed dreams of this brutal past year.

With all this in mind, I created the above collage haiga (art plus haiku). I used hand-painted and torn Japanese papers, sumi ink, prints made from ferns and redwood sprigs, and vintage Japanese letters from the 1920s. Though our scars may not always be visible, we have each come through a lot to get here. This  piece honors that struggle and the process of growth, and is meant to evoke a sense of hope and healing after trauma. 

bright green needles
on the fire-scarred redwood—
what we’ve each survived

Here’s to survival and new growth!

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“kingfisher” is 8x5. This collage of a female Belted Kingfisher was commissioned as the cover for the excellent new Kingfisher haiku journal. Check it out! © Annette Makino 2021

Makino Studios News

“The ultimate affirmation” - The Eureka Times-Standard ran a lovely feature on my Touchstone Award for haiku, including my process of writing poems and creating collages.

“Word and Image: Exploring Modern Haiga” - I will present this session on haiga, or art combined with haiku, together with Linda Papanicolaou, Editor of HaigaOnline, at the Haiku Society of America’s annual conference. This year’s event runs Saturday and Sunday, June 12-13, and is free via Zoom. Anyone can register. From the program:

Annette Makino will first share a brief slide show of some of her watercolor haiga over the past ten years. Her presentation will draw from the first full-length book of her art, called Water and Stone, with publication in Summer 2021. Linda Papanicolaou will then explain approaches to linking and shifting between the words and image in haiga, with examples. For the bulk of the session, participants will try their hands at writing haiku to accompany several provided images. There will be time to share the results of this foray into creating haiga. 

Water and Stone - I am close to finishing my book manuscript! This will feature my fifty favorite watercolor haiga of the past ten years, along with fifteen new haibun (autobiographical prose pieces with haiku). I’m hoping to have it ready in June or July.

Cards - My current card designs, including the new “bright green needles” design above, are available here.

2021 fairs and events - Northcoast Open Studios, which is usually held in late May and early June, will not take place this spring, but may happen in the fall. The North Country Fair on the Arcata Plaza is scheduled to take place Sept. 18-19 this year, if COVID-19 safety permits. 

Thanks - I really appreciate all the kind responses to my last post, “Big news on Haiku Poetry Day.”