James Hiroshi Suzuki first studied in Japan with Yoshio Markino and, after arriving in the United States in the 1950s, studied at the Portland School of Fine Arts in Maine and the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, DC. He taught at University of California, Berkeley in 1962, California College of Arts and Crafts from 1964-1965, and at California State University in Sacramento since 1999.
Edge of the City is a successful and alluring composition that pulls the viewer in. Suzuki’s clusters of color and composition feel slightly pre-meditated rather than intuitive pressing the viewer to sense they are seeing “a subject”. The title, Edge of the City, points the viewer towards a slightly narrative composition. The attention to a very balanced composition may originate from the artists Asian influences, as he was born in Japan. When Suzuki painted this work, he was teaching art at one of the California colleges. He had been in the States for approximately 10 years. Amongst the Asian American artists who traveled to America were Inokuma Gen’ichiro and Kenzo Okada, two wonderful artists. Suzuki’s work is interesting and deserves more study and understanding, which has not occurred yet in the market.
In the footsteps of such giants of Color Field painting (an extension of Abstract Expressionism), as Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman, Suzuki has reduced all references to nature in his painting entitled Edge of the City from 1965. These artists chose to eliminate all overt recognizable imagery in favor of pure abstraction. For this landscape painting Suzuki has chosen colors that are reflective of the earth, air, and sky, a trait characteristic of many Japanese and Korean painters. In this expressive and dynamic picture Suzuki employs large flat areas of color as the essential nature of his visual abstraction. The picture is both sensual and deeply expressive with its highly articulated areas of soaked color that are unified and cohesive in this work of pure abstraction.