"Numbers One to Ten"
Stone lithograph by Sabro Hasegawa,
printed in Mel Strawn's workshop, 1956

Among Many Things to be Thankful For

The Sunday turned out to be a bit bleak. We packed lunches anyway and drove across the bay to pick up Sabro. Then across the Golden Gate Bridge and on up the coast to Jenner where the Russian River finds the Pacific Ocean. Our objective was the north beach, always a wonderland of bleached driftwood trees. To my initial chagrin we found a wasteland of charred wood, the remnants of a substantial fire in our former tree, sand and water retreat. It was windy and cold with a still leaden sky. Sand was drifting - and making our sandwiches live up to their name. We chose to stay for some time, walking about, looking and, I at least, lamenting the loss of the ghostly, sculptural, pristine, polished, bleached wood that had always been there and that we had driven for hours to show my teacher.

Earlier, when I went to his room to pick him up, Sabro asked me in and invited me to sit down. There was a paper screen opposite my place on the floor. A large, black and white ink rubbing with the texture of wood grain was the image on the screen, the only art in sight. After looking for several minutes, I asked, "what is it"? Sabro said "nothing". Gradually I came to understand it be Mu, the Japanese (and Chinese) character that signifies 'nothingness' or 'emptiness'.

Leaving the charcoaled, sand-drifting beach we drove back down the coast, stopping once in a while to watch the surf pound the island rocks below us. A bleak day. Almost empty, almost nothing.

I had promised to print a lithograph for Sabro and had told him - "anytime, the stone is prepared'. I had my own press and several lithographic stones - on which the original image is drawn for later transfer to paper. On Monday night after supper Sabro appeared at our door and said he wanted to start the print. The stone was large and, like all lithographic stones, had a somewhat irregular edge. This is traditionally ignored, being marked off with a non-printing rectangular border inside the stone's edge. Sabro, however, started by placing a big sheet of paper over the stone and then rubbed around the edge with crayon, making the first mark that of the irregular edge itself. He then cut ten holes in the paper and taped it to the stone.

A necessary technical point: a lithographic image is made by drawing with a greasy crayon (or liquid) on virgin, grained limestone. The part touched by grease resists water. The untouched stone is physically and chemically treated with gum arabic, basically to resist oil and accept water on the open parts and to accept oil-based ink and reject water on the marked parts.

In the cut out spaces, Sabro wrote the numbers one to ten in Japanese characters, using a rectangular litho crayon instead of a brush. He then protected them (and some surrounding white space) with strips of cellophane tape. Some parts of the stone were still open - not covered by paper mask or tape. In these areas he stenciled greasy liquid tusche through our landlady's liberated lace curtain, which he found in the basement where I kept my press. The "controlled accident" of this process left charred looking blotches of textured black and white.

On the second day the paper mask came off and the stone's edge was touched with grease, making the outline image of the stone itself susceptible to printer's ink. It would print, revealing the stone's natural and irregular shape. In the newly opened space between the cutout and numbers shapes Sabro gently drifted hard crayon across the finely ground, textured stone surface.

The print, which resulted, "Numbers One to Ten," is expressive of the wind, sand, charred wood Sunday picnic. Trees became the numerals - well, one can see it.

The artist was Sabro Hasegawa, or Hasegawa Saburo in Japanese convention, possibly the first modern abstract artist in Japan. A world-traveled, world-class teacher, scholar and artist, he lived, studied, worked and taught in the United States and Europe as well as in Japan. He wanted to understand everything and to provoke consequences for future art of both East and West. It was 1956; he was my graduate teacher. In 1957 he died. He is still my teacher, although I am now considerably older than he was then.

This short note was prompted by discovering the "Numbers One To Ten" print reproduced in "Japanese Art After 1945 - Scream Against the Sky", by Alexandra Munroe, Harry Abrams publisher, 1994. A final note on the making of the print: After pulling the first proof the stone was closed. I opened it two days later, re-inked it and pulled a second proof - which had darkened, losing some of the silvery delicacy of the first proof which, of course, Sabro had seen. I took the new, darkened but richer version for him to see, full of foreboding that I had ruined it. He listened to my tale of woe about what had happened, and then took a rather long time to study the new version. Finally he said, "It is better. Print the edition." - which I did. In the reproduction in Munroe's book, the full image is given, including the irregular stone's edge. (I have seen it elsewhere, in his own, posthumous history published in 1977, with that edge cropped off - an unfortunate publisher's error. …)

Mel Strawn
Co-founder of The Bay Printmakers Society, 1955 (with Will Peterson)
Professor Emeritus, University of Denver
April 19, 2006