Q&A: A Closer Look with Annette Makino

Artist and haiku poet Annette Makino works on a collage.

STICKS & STONES (Erica Goss's monthly newsletter dedicated to poetry, reading and literature)

ISSUE 91, JULY 1, 2024

(Read on Erica Goss’ website; scroll down to Q&A)

A Closer Look with Annette Makino

Our mothers became friends when we were toddlers, so I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Annette Makino. Annette has lived in Japan and Europe, traveled widely in her career as a journalist, and runs Makino Studios from her home in Northern California.

EG:  How did you get started with haiku?

AM: I first learned about and wrote haiku in sixth grade as part of a lesson on syllables. Like so many of us, I was mis-taught that haiku in English have to follow a three-line, 5-7-5 syllable count. Turns out this rule is something of an urban myth, based on a misunderstanding of how Japanese sound-syllables carry over to English syllables. Literary haiku that are published in the leading haiku journals in English are almost always shorter than 5-7-5. Also, nowadays the classic three-line format has broadened to include one-line haiku and other variations. 

Anyhow, after that awkward sixth grade introduction, I set haiku aside for almost four decades. But in 2010 an artist friend gave me a lovely book of poems by her Japanese grandmother that were illustrated by my friend. These were senryu, a more humorous or wry cousin of haiku that focuses on the foibles of human nature. I was inspired to start writing my own senryu and then moved on to haiku, sort of entering by the back door. I also began creating haiga, a Japanese tradition of art combined with haiku.

EG: Haiga is art plus haiku. Is this form more accessible to the public? In what ways?

AM: I must confess that even as a poet myself, I find much of contemporary poetry to be inaccessible—or just too much work to figure out! Haiku, sometimes called "one-breath poems,” tend to be more digestible. When you add in a visual component, as in a haiga, the piece becomes even easier to approach, even for those who never read poetry. While not everyone enjoys chewing on poetry, we all naturally respond to images.

Besides publishing a book of my watercolor haiga, I publish an annual mini-calendar featuring my haiga. Most of my customers aren’t haiku poets or haiga connoisseurs; they just like the words and images. So you might say the calendar is a stealthy way of spreading poetry among people who might not otherwise seek it out.

EG: What comes first, haiku or art?

AM: I usually write the haiku first, then create the art—for some reason that's easier for me. But there are times when I just have the urge to create a collage of say, jellyfish, and then I have to come up with the haiku after the fact. That is tricker. 

A challenge is that in the best haiga, the image is not simply an illustration of the words and the words are not just a description of the image. Rather, there should be a bit of a gap between word and image just as there should be a gap between the two parts of a haiku, deepening the piece and allowing the viewer or reader room to provide their own interpretation. Getting that distance just right is my eternal quest. You can see some examples of haiga on my website gallery. 

EG: How do you balance running a small business with your artistic work?

AM: Small business owners know you could work 24/7 just on the business side of things: marketing, accounting, filling orders. So it can be hard to prioritize the time to make art and write. It’s always less urgent, even though that’s the core of my Makino Studios art business. 

On the plus side, I get so much positive feedback from my customers, whether online, in stores or at art fairs. They tell me how my cards, especially, help them connect with the people they love. For instance, at a holiday fair, an older woman told me that one of my cards was the perfect message to make up with her sister after they’d had a fight. Another time, a burly guy in a skydiving sweatshirt shared that whenever he goes out of town, he leaves a different card for his wife to open every day; he especially loves giving her my cards. My book inspired a 90-year old man to start writing and sharing haiku with his daughter two states away, and then to take a haiku class. And at a recent dental visit, I spotted my book in the exam room, right next to a teeth model. Turns out a customer had given it to his hygienist who thought patients might find it calming. Knowing my work has a concrete impact on people means the world to me and motivates me to keep creating and putting the work out there. 

Also, I hate this fact, but I sometimes need external pressure, like a calendar printing deadline, to buckle down and start producing. So in that sense, running Makino Studios gives me an incentive to make art and write even when I don’t feel particularly inspired. 

EG: Can you share any advice you have for someone just starting out as an artist or writer?

AM: Expose yourself to a variety of artists and poets, and of genres. Notice what moves you. Go deeper in that direction.

Create regularly—a bad draft can always be improved later, and it's a lot better than starting with a blank page. I made myself a rule that I have to write a haiku before checking social media. Though I often fall off the wagon, I now write more poems and spend less time scrolling Instagram or Facebook. 

Read, take classes, join groups, whatever works best for you to deepen your practice. But whatever you learn, keep trusting your own voice, your own creative urge. You have something unique to contribute to the world.

Finally, few of us are likely to get rich on our poetry and art, so have fun! 

let us live
on poetry and honey
so rich on the tongue

Annette Makino’s work is regularly published in the leading journals of haiku and haiga in English and in many anthologies. Her haiku have garnered international honors, including the Touchstone Award, the Henderson Haiku Award, the Brady Senryu Award and the Porad Haiku Award. Her book, Water and Stone: Ten Years of Art and Haiku, won Honorable Mention in the Haiku Society of America’s Merit Book Awards. Raised by a Japanese father and a Swiss mother, Annette has lived in Japan and Europe. Visit her website for a gallery of her art as well as greeting cards, prints, and a blog about her creative process.

Read Annette’s article in the December 12, 2023 issue of the Haiku Society of America.

Art Beat: Annette Makino’s Life in Collage

Annette Makino. Photo by Maya Makino

LOUISA ROGERS, NORTH COAST JOURNAL, EUREKA, CA, DECEMBER 21, 2023

Annette Makino has been an artist all her life but it wasn't until 2010 that she became interested in incorporating haiku into her artwork. For her birthday that year, her Arcata friend and fellow artist Amy Uyeki gave her a book of senryu, a poetic form structurally similar to haiku but with more humor and a focus on human nature. The poems were written by Uyeki’s Japanese grandmother and accompanied by Uyeki’s art.

“This lovely book set me on my current path,” says Makino, whose father is also Japanese. She started combining her haiku with simple brush paintings, which evolved to Asian-inspired watercolors and then collages. A year later, after leaving her 20-year career as senior vice president for communications at the Arcata-based nonprofit Internews, she launched Makino Studios, offering collages, watercolors, prints, cards and calendars.

Annette Makino’s “All that I am” incorporates book pages, a fern print, a vintage Japanese letter and washi paper, as well as asemic, or made-up, writing by her nephew.

Currently she works mostly with collage using hand-painted and torn Japanese washi papers, which are typically made from the fibers of the mulberry plant. She also uses other papers from different parts of her life—letters, her young nephew’s scribbles, book pages, musical scores and maps. To make sure the pieces don’t fade over time, she uses acrylic paints to color the white paper, then tears it into the shapes she wants and glues it onto paper or wood, a process that typically takes two to three days. According to Makino, a common misconception is that collage doesn't require much skill. “It’s very labor intensive and can involve as much skill as painting,” she says.

Makino’s most productive periods of artwork happen twice every summer, when she and her husband, Paul, a retired Cal Poly Humboldt geography professor, rent a cabin on the Klamath River in Orleans, a place they've visited for 27 years. In that placid location, free from distractions, she can get a lot of work done.

Makino usually writes the haiku first, before the artwork. “The words aren’t meant to illustrate the art,” she says. “You want a bit of distance, so the reader has a new way to think about the theme.” She often starts crafting the poem while hiking in Ma-le'l Dunes or in Trinidad, where she and Paul walk a couple of times a week.

Makino considers herself equal parts artist and writer. Her book Water and Stone: Ten Years of Art and Haiku was awarded Honorable Mention in the Haiku Society of America's Merit Book Awards and her poetry regularly appears in English-language haiku journals, including Modern Haiku, Frogpond and The Heron’s Nest. She has also won awards for her poetry from the Haiku Foundation and the Haiku Society of America.

Many of Makino’s haiku have to do with transitions. A few years ago, for example, when her two young adult children started the process of leaving home, she wrote about the empty nest, while the loss of her 16-year-old dog inspired many poems last summer. Her 95-year-old mother Erika, a former Humboldt resident and also a writer and artist, lives three hours away in Mendocino County. Makino visits her about once a month and is keenly aware of her mom’s gradual decline. That, and the earthquake last winter which caused a lot of damage to her home, have inspired her poetry and art. “Whatever life brings me,” she says. 

Makino’s “Garden rosebush,” a collage of book pages, a letter and envelope from the artist’s grandmother, handmade and Japanese washi papers, painted, torn and glued onto birch wood panel.

Makino was one of five local artists granted the 2022 Victor Thomas Jacoby award for “artistic vision and creativity,” provided annually by the Humboldt Area Foundation and Wild Rivers Community Foundation. Winners each received $10,000 to support their work. The award freed her from some of the commercial pressures of running a business and creating mostly marketable art that appeals to the public. Instead, she experimented with mixed media, using materials like charcoal, crayon, ink and pencil in her collages, and exploring oils and cold wax.

Recently, she’s been incorporating more personally meaningful elements into her collages. Because Paul loves maps, she created a collage for him that included a detailed map of Tibet. Another collage she created with whales incorporated a scrap from her daughter’s high school copy of Moby Dick. For “Garden rosebush,” she says, “I included a letter from my Swiss grandmother when I got married.”

Makino’s Japanese-Swiss ancestry has shaped her creativity. The haiku and Japanese paper may be more apparent to viewers but, “The Swiss, too, are surprisingly very playful in their art and writing,” she says, noting she likes to bring that spirit of play into her work.

Makino’s cards, prints and calendars are available at the Made in Humboldt Fair at Pierson Garden Shop through Dec. 24, and in shops around the county year-round. You can see more of her work at makinostudios.com.

Louisa Rogers (she/her) is a writer, painter and paddleboarder who lives in Eureka and Guanajuato, Mexico.

Read on the North Coast Journal site

Pleasures and pitfalls in creating haiga

This haiga by Annette Makino was published in Contemporary Haibun Online in December 2023, and appears in her 2024 calendar of art and haiku. © Annette Makino 2023

ANNETTE MAKINO, HAIKU SOCIETY OF AMERICA NEWSLETTER, DECEMBER 5, 2023

You probably know the satisfaction of writing a well-crafted haiku, when just the right words in the right order create something greater than the sum of its parts. Now imagine that feeling magnified by adding a visual dimension, opening up an extra avenue of creative expression. That is the reward of creating haiga.

You will also find that haiga are more accessible to your cousins, colleagues or others who aren’t particularly interested in haiku. An arresting image combined with a few well-chosen lines of haiku is easy to digest without any knowledge of Japanese poetry. For many years I have published a calendar of my haiga. Sold mainly in grocery stores, bookstores and plant nurseries in my community, these reach hundreds of people each year who have no special connection to haiku, but who find beauty and meaning in the haiga.

“But wait,” I hear you objecting, “I don’t have an artistic bone in my body!” Fear not. In the Japanese tradition, haiga did not require any particular artistic skill. Though there were certainly practitioners who were great artists, like Buson, most haiga images were very modest. The creator’s sincerity and individual expression were key.

Also, with today’s availability of digital photography and photo editing apps, creating variations of haiga is more accessible than ever. (But note the hazards of photo-haiga, below.)

As haiku poets, we have learned that, typically, a key element of an effective haiku is to “mind the gap”—to create some distance between the one-line fragment and the two-line phrase of each poem, enabling readers to make connections themselves. (Of course, some powerful poems break this general guideline.)

The same holds true in the juxtaposition of the image and words in a haiga. Stephen Addiss has written, “In a fine haiga, the poem does not just explain the painting, nor does the painting merely illustrate the poem. Instead, they add layers of meaning to each other.”

However, in my experience, this is easier said than done. If the haiku doesn’t include a strong visual element, it is fairly simple to create some disjunction between the art and text. But if your haiku contains a visual image, as many effective poems do, and if you are using a representational artistic style, it can be hard to find the right distance between the poem and the art. On the one hand, you don’t want to make the connection too obvious; on the other, you don’t want to confound or disengage the viewer.

For instance, in a haiku about a fledgling learning to fly, pictures of birds immediately come to mind. But some other potential visual subjects that offer related but less overt connections might include feathers, fields or clouds. Even paper airplanes!

Correspondingly, if your artistic style is more abstract, it’s easier to create contrast between the text and art even if the haiku features a visual image. For instance, traditional Japanese haiga made of a few semi-abstract brushstrokes allow plenty of space for the viewer to fill in.

I find that many haiga using photos (known as shahai in Japanese) leave me cold; a photo can contain so much visual information that it closes down interpretations of the piece as a whole. But photo-based haiga can be successful if they use more impressionistic images like simple landscapes or extreme closeups. Photos that are manipulated with filters to become somewhat abstracted can also be very effective. And a more detailed photo can still work if the poem shifts away from it enough.

There is a lot involved in crafting haiga; I’ve only touched the surface here. But in the end, I encourage you to create what you want to create. Guidelines can be helpful, but don’t let them limit you. It’s all about the joy of expressing yourself!

•

See the gallery of Annette’s haiga.

See her 2024 haiga calendar.

See an essay on linking in haiga by Michael Dylan Welch.

Haiku Poets of Northern California - Featured Reader: Annette Makino

HAIKU POETS OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, QUARTERLY MEETING, OCTOBER 15, 2023

On October 15, 2023, Annette Makino was one of two featured readers for the fall quarterly meeting of the Haiku Poets of Northern California held on Zoom.

Watch the 15-minute presentation on YouTube, where she shows more than 50 of her Japanese-inspired watercolor and collage haiga (art combined with haiku) and explains a bit about her process. Introduction by HPNC President Garry Gay.

‘Water and Stone’: Arcata artist publishes first full-length collection of art and haiku

Pictured is the cover of Annette Makino's new book, "Water and Stone." College Cove is seen in the background.

EUREKA TIMES-STANDARD, EUREKA, CA, AUGUST 25, 2021

In this fractured world, a new book by award-winning haiku poet and artist Annette Makino hopes to provide a dose of Zen wisdom and humor. “Water and Stone: Ten Years of Art and Haiku” is a full-color collection that spans a decade of Makino’s paintings and poems.

“As I celebrated 10 years as a working artist this year, I decided to publish a book of the best of my art and haiku over that time,” Makino said. “Locals will recognize many beloved Humboldt landscapes like Moonstone Beach, College Cove, the Klamath River and Redwood National Park, plus native plants and animals.”

“Water and Stone” features 50 haiga — artworks combined with haiku — painted with Japanese watercolors and sumi ink. In the first full-length collection of her art and haiku, Makino finds beauty and meaning in the everyday world, be it the rhythm of ocean waves, the bittersweet joys of parenting or a traumatized rescue dog.

Sprinkled throughout the collection are 15 haibun — autobiographical prose pieces that include haiku. While deeply personal, these touch on universal themes such as the quest for meaningful work, finding love, raising a family, growing older and considering a place in the world.

Stephen Addiss, author of “The Art of Haiku,” has praised the book, saying, “With the publication of ‘Water and Stone,’ Annette Makino takes her place among the leaders of haiku painting (haiga).”

Annette Makino.

Makino is an award-winning haiku poet and artist based in Arcata who combines Japanese-inspired paintings and collages with her poems. Her work has appeared in the leading English-language haiku and haiga journals and anthologies. Makino’s poems have won honors in the Touchstone Awards, the Henderson Haiku Contest, the Brady Senryu Contest, the Porad Haiku Award, and the Jane Reichhold International Prize, among others.

Through the art business she founded in 2011, Makino Studios, she shares her haiga and offers prints, greeting cards and calendars of her art.

Published by Makino Studios, “Water and Stone” is 124 pages and features full color. It is sold in Eureka at Eureka Books, Eureka Natural Foods and the North Coast Co-op; in Arcata at the North Coast Co-op, Northtown Books, Plaza and Wildberries Marketplace; in McKinleyville at Blake’s Books, Eureka Natural Foods and Miller Farms; and in Trinidad at the Trinidad Trading Company. The book is also available at www.makinostudios.com or amazon.com for $24.99 plus tax and shipping.

For more information, visit www.makinostudios.com or call 707-362-6644.

BUSINESS SENSE: The business of art in Humboldt County

Artist Annette Makino in her studio. Photo: Brandi Easter

BY ANNETTE MAKINO, TIMES-STANDARD, EUREKA, CA, JUNE 27, 2021

Humboldt County is known for two things: redwoods and cannabis. Color us green! But we have another, less famous distinction: more artists per capita than any other county in California. Perhaps it’s the natural beauty that inspires so many artists. Or maybe it’s the acceptance of nontraditional lifestyles. 

But what does it take to survive as an artist here? When I first became a working artist 10 years ago, mixed media artist Claire Iris Schencke told me, “Humboldt is a great place to be an artist. It’s just not a great place to sell art.”

On the plus side, we have terrific support for artists. For the visual arts alone, we have a rich ecology of groups like the Humboldt Arts Council, the Ink People and the Redwood Art Association. 

There are artist-run cooperative galleries in Eureka, Arcata and Trinidad. Local events like Arts Alive!, North Coast Open Studios, and arts and crafts fairs help connect artists with the community. 

Our cities have made a point of supporting the arts: witness all the murals sprouting in Eureka and beyond. The City of Arcata’s draft Strategic Arts Plan has a goal of making Arcata affordable for artists.

On the minus side, unlike big urban areas, Humboldt doesn’t have a lot of “high net-worth individuals,” aka rich people, who can afford to buy original art. That is even more true since cannabis was legalized. (Of course, we artists deeply appreciate it when someone of modest means chooses to buy a piece they love.)

Even before the pandemic, many of our local galleries had closed, including the Piante, Black Faun, and First Street galleries in Eureka and the Mateel Gallery in Garberville. This is part of a discouraging national trend.

The hard truth is that very few Humboldt artists, no matter how skilled, can support themselves by selling original art. Some have related income from grants or teaching art; most of my art income comes from cards and calendars of my work. Other artists live on day jobs, rental or investment income, or a supportive partner. 

A conundrum for artists everywhere is that to be financially successful, an artist needs to be savvy about business and self-promotion. This is not necessarily their strength. And a morning spent on marketing is a morning away from the studio.

Well-known Arcata painter Alan Sanborn mainly sells watercolors from his home, by word of mouth. “I’m not very good at business; I’m just really good at painting,” he told me recently. “I could have been very good at business—as long as I didn’t paint.” Aye, there’s the rub.

So why do it? Why try to survive as an artist when there are far easier ways to make a living? 

Well, the rewards are priceless: to have the freedom to express yourself. To create something of value that no one else could create. And to share that vision with the world. Libby Maynard, Executive Director of the Ink People, puts it well: “If you’re an artist it’s a calling, and if you don’t make art, you go crazy.”

So despite the challenges of the business of art, I believe that along with redwood forests and cannabis farms, Humboldt will always be rich in artists.

————

Annette Makino offers art, cards and calendars of her work through local stores and at makinostudios.com. Her new book, Water and Stone: Ten Years of Art and Haiku, was just published by Makino Studios. 

‘The ultimate affirmation’: Artist, poet Annette Makino wins a coveted Touchstone Award from the Haiku Foundation

This collage by Annette Makino is made from painted and torn Japanese washi papers. Featuring a view of the Klamath River, it incorporates her winning one-line haiku.

BY HEATHER SHELTON, TIMES-STANDARD, EUREKA, CA, APRIL 25, 2021

April 17 was International Haiku Poetry Day and, on that day, artist and poet Annette Makino received exciting news.

Makino, of Arcata, was awarded one of the highest honors for English-language haiku, a Touchstone Award from the Haiku Foundation. The annual award recognizes the best individual poems published each previous year.

“I’m thrilled that my haiku has won this award,” Makino said. “You should have heard the whooping from my house! I’ve been studying and writing haiku for 10 years now, and this feels like the ultimate affirmation that I’m getting the hang of it.”

This year, there were 1,302 poems nominated from 31 countries for the Touchstone Award.

“The Touchstone Award is unique as far as I know in that the poems must have won an award or been selected for publication before they can even be considered for nomination,” Makino said. “And most of the nominations come from haiku editors, not the poets themselves. So, it’s really the creme de la creme of all the haiku written in English that year. My husband refers to it as the Nobel Prize for haiku.”

Makino says her haiku was eligible to be nominated because it won the Porad Haiku Award sponsored by Haiku Northwest last fall. To read all of the Touchstone Award for Individual Poems winners for 2020, go to https://thehaikufoundation.org/touchstone-awards-for-individual-poems-2020.

Makino — whose work regularly appears in the leading journals and anthologies of haiku in English — wrote her Touchstone Award-winning one-line haiku while on a recent creative retreat at the Klamath River in Orleans. It reads:

long before language the S of the river

“I was walking along Ishi Pishi Road with my husband during a weeklong vacation/art retreat last summer. I looked down at the Klamath River, which parallels the road, and saw a beautiful S-shaped curve,” Makino said.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has gotten me thinking about big questions like human existence and mortality,” she added. “It occurred to me that the river was flowing long before our species came along, and will continue to flow long after our extinction. When I feel too caught up in our human dramas, there is something comforting in that knowledge.”

Artist and haiku poet Annette Makino is at work in her studio. (Photo by Brandi Easter)

Makino — whose haiku have won many other awards — first got involved with writing haiku in 2010 when her friend, Amy Uyeki, gave her a book that she and her mother had produced featuring poems by Uyeki’s Japanese grandmother.

“This introduced me to haiku and senryu, haiku’s humorous cousin,” Makino said. “From Amy, I also learned about the Japanese tradition of haiga, art combined with haiku. I soon started experimenting with writing my own poems and painting haiga.”

Makino says she loves how a haiku can convey so much in three lines or fewer.

“It’s a deceptively simple art form with great depth that rewards re-reading,” she said. “And in describing a unique personal experience or observation, a good haiku can connect to something universal. There is an intangible exchange between the poet and the reader.

“Most of us are sadly mis-taught that an English-language haiku needs to follow a five-seven-five syllable pattern,” she said. “In fact, that formula is based on a misunderstanding of how Japanese sound-syllables relate to English. Most serious haiku poets don’t follow this syllable count, writing shorter poems that more closely match the feel of Japanese haiku. There are other aspects of a haiku that are much more important and harder to master, such as the juxtaposition of two images or ideas.”

For the past decade, Makino has also run her business, Makino Studios, through which she sells her art (both Japanese watercolors and Japanese-inspired collages) and haiku in the form of cards and calendars in stores and online. She hopes to participate — as in years past — in some fairs and festivals in late 2021 if it is safe to do so.

“This past year, I have focused on creating collages using Japanese washi papers that I paint and other found papers like old letters, book pages, vintage stamps and maps,” she said. “I’m also having fun incorporating natural objects like feathers or sand dollars. And most of my pieces include an original haiku.

This collage by Annette Makino includes her original haiku: “bright green needles/on the fire-scarred redwood—/what we’ve each survived.” It is made with hand-painted rice paper printed with redwood twigs and ferns, sumi ink, acrylic paint, vintage Japanese letters and glue on illustration board.

“When I’m creating, I love how things can come together unexpectedly,” Makino said. “There is a lot of serendipity involved, especially in collage. For instance, I recently created a collage to go with a haiku about a fire-scarred redwood. I was happy to find a piece of rice paper with a big streak of black sumi ink on it to represent the burnt tree, and I came across some other papers that I had printed on a gel press using redwood twigs and ferns. I tore a couple of hand-written letters from 1920s Japan into vertical strips to represent trees in the background. It was a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.”

Makino is now at work on her first full-length book with the working title “Water and Stone,” to be published in the early summer. The book, a culmination of a decade of painting and writing, will feature 50 of her haiga, painted with Japanese watercolors and sumi ink.

“I’ve always been a bookworm and a writer. Even as a kid, I wanted to publish books — about what, I had no idea,” she said.

“My art business, Makino Studios, is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. As I mark a decade as a working artist and haiku poet,” Makino said, “it struck me that I could capture the best of my creative work over this time in a full-color book.”

She added, “It’s been a satisfying process to go through all my art and haiku and decide what to include. After I chose 50 pieces, I felt that the rhythm of so many haiku in a row was a bit monotonous. So, I drew from the past 10 years of Makino Studios blog posts and wrote 15 haibun, a Japanese literary form combining autobiographical prose with haiku. These are short vignettes or essays that will weave through the book. It was a challenge to learn a whole new writing technique, but I’m happy with the results, as I think these pieces add a lot of texture and depth to the book.”

For more information about Makino and her work, visit www.makinostudios.com or call 707-362-6644.

A ‘silver lining’: Amid the pandemic, a local artist finds a whole new artistic approach

Annette Makino of Arcata has been making art since she was a child. She’s now creating collage using hand-painted and torn washi papers combined with old letters, book pages, maps and other found papers. Her work also includes original haiku.

BY HEATHER SHELTON, TIMES-STANDARD, EUREKA, CA, NOV. 13, 2020

Local artist Annette Makino has found herself with more time on her hands during the COVID-19 health crisis, and she has used those extra hours to come up with a brand new artistic approach.

“With fairs and art shows canceled this year and some of my retailers seeing reduced sales, the pandemic has slowed down my business,” Makino said. “The silver lining of this difficult time is that I’ve had more time to play in the studio.”

After 10 years of working in watercolor and sumi ink, Makino recently switched gears and started making collages from hand-painted and torn washi papers, sometimes combined with old letters, book pages, maps, junk mail and other found papers. The collages, she said, draw inspiration from the natural landscapes of Northern California and from her Japanese heritage.

“I start with white washi paper, which is traditional Japanese paper that often has bits of leaves, rice straw or other plant fibers embedded in it,” Makino said. “I mix my own paint colors and paint the paper, then tear it as needed for my collages. … Recent collages include bits of a musical score from my choir, old family photos and a letter from my sister. It’s really meaningful to be able to incorporate different aspects of my life into my art.”

Annette Makino says the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced her haiku and art. This work was created in recent months. “(It) reflects a sense of the transience of human existence,” Makino said.

She added: “The fun thing about collage is that you can use any materials you want to make something interesting and meaningful. I paint and decorate all sorts of papers for my art, but I also save things like old keys, bird feathers and foreign stamps for possible use in collages. It fascinates me how a beautiful collage can come together from torn paper and odd bits.”

One thing that hasn’t changed in Makino’s work over the past months is the incorporation of original haiku in her creations.

Makino — who has been making art since she was a child — learned about the Japanese tradition of “haiga,” or art combined with haiku, in 2010.

“I started creating my own haiga, writing haiku and making paintings with Japanese watercolors and sumi ink,” she said. “In 2011, I started my art business, Makino Studios, which sells cards, prints and calendars of my work in stores and online.”

Haiku, she said, is a compact form of poetry, typically three short lines.

This original haiku, featured on Annette Makino’s collage work, was just published in Modern Haiku magazine.

“To write it effectively, you have to distill an observation or experience down to its essence,” Makino said. “I appreciate how the haiku mindset helps me to be more present in the moment, noticing little things like the way the woods look after a rainstorm.”

She shares this haiku — just published in Modern Haiku magazine — about her imagery above:

shortest day
on the tip of each fern
a drop of light

A few weeks ago, Makino attended a virtual haiku conference, the Seabeck Haiku Getaway, which is normally held in Washington State.

“There were about 160 haiku poets from 14 countries, some staying up all night in their time zone to participate,” she said.  “It was a lot of fun to connect with this community, even via Zoom. I gave a presentation on my new collage haiga there, the first time I’d presented this new work in a public forum, and I’m happy to say it was very warmly received.”

Pictured is one of Annette Makino’s new collage works. The featured haiku recently won first place in the Porad Haiku Award program.

Makino’s haiku are regularly published in leading journals of haiku and have also appeared in a number of haiku anthologies, including the Red Moon Anthology, and she just won first place in the Porad Haiku Award sponsored by Haiku Northwest for this work:

long before language the S of the river

“It was written during a walk along the Klamath River in Orleans, and my collage is based on a photo I took there,” she said.

Twelve of Makino’s collages are featured in her 2021 haiga calendar which, along with note cards and signed prints, are available at the “Made in Humboldt” event at Pierson Garden Shop in Eureka through Dec. 24.

“This will be the only fair where you can find my work this season,” said Makino, whose work is also available at several local stores in Eureka, Arcata, McKinleyville, Trinidad and Manila. Her work is available on her website, https://www.makinostudios.com, as well.

In addition to her new collages, Makino is still offering her watercolor cards and prints for sale.

“I’m grateful to have a loyal fan base here in Humboldt and I want to make sure people can still find their favorite designs,” she said.