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Hiroko Kamegai can’t stop apologizing: “My technique is so simple you will laugh,” she warns.“No, I won’t,” I say. “Yes, you will think it’s a joke,” she insists.“No I won’t, I say. “You’re going to think I’m a big fake.”
This goes on for quite a while until Mrs Kamegai, one of the leading suibokuga ink painting artists of her day, finally leads me, groveling, into her work space to show me her embarrassing technique. Mrs Kamegai has made her name not only with Chinese-style ink paintings—all misty mountains and deep valleys, lakes with ducks and lone fishermen—but more recently with colourful abstracts combining sumi ink and garish Chinese pigments that look more like the jumbled neon-lit streets of Shinjuku. In her earlier days she was painting realistic land- and townscapes that make you admire her talent for composition and colour. Very little of the old realism now appears in her art, for she much prefers working with unknown quantities.
 “Well, here goes. You’ll laugh, but you just get a sheet of glass like this, see, and then you smear some ink here and then some of this here (a special secret ingredient), and then you press the two pieces of glass together, see, and press that on your paper and…”
It’s simple, but I am not laughing; far from it. I can see that the technique she has developed for producing interesting effects with the ink could be done by a child but it is after those squishy imprints have gone onto the paper that the real work of the artist begins.
The ink pressings produce dots and stripes and other more complex patterns like veins or sea ferns and she explains that she joins many of these glass pressings, mosaic-like, together to form a larger scene. The ferny-looking bits become trees, the dotty bits become land, white bits are left to become sky or sea or a mountain stream. She might add some detail, but tries to use the brush as little as possible. The resulting scene is on such a grand scale that the origin of its elements is altogether forgotten. I wonder how I would go about making one of her amazingly beautiful works out of all those blots and know I am out of my depth. So Mrs Kamegai shows me the simple glass press technique that her Chinese teacher first revealed. Onto the glass goes a runny smear of brown here and a runny smear of dark blue there and a darker splotch of black sumi there. So far the smears and splotches are mine. It looks like nothing and I have no way of guessing how it will turn out. Now we place a sheet of paper on the glass to reveal… what? Mrs Kamegai can see something there so she puts a temple on the top of my blob to reveal a craggy island outcrop. It looks a bit lonely so she adds some even mistier outcrops to the background, some foreground grass and a full moon illuminating the scene. “There, look what you did,” she praises me. “You could go in a competition with that!”
Hiroko Kamegai had a talent for art from being a very young child but only started taking serious lessons after her son was old enough to go to school. Her first teacher specialized in Nanga – Japanese literati paintings copying the old Chinese styles. Her interest in Chinese painting continued and she studied with two more teachers before her writer husband was serendipitously offered a teaching position at a university in China . There she was tutored by a progressive artist who was also a university art teacher, able to introduce her to the whole range of ink painting tricks and techniques.
“If it wasn’t for him showing me the glass technique I would not be the artist that I am today,” she reveals.
Kamegai has taken out prestigious Japanese awards for both traditional and abstract works in ink and though the abstract ones attract the attention of the Japanese judges, it is the glass press that continues to fascinate her. Putting brush on paper has become too direct. She likes the comfort of being one step removed from her art by the accidents of ink pressing. “I can spend the whole day just making ink blots and imagining scenes in them,” she muses. As I clutch my precious island outcrop collaboration, ready to leave, I think I know what she means. | 
