When I was young, probably just nine or ten years old, my mother took my sister and I to take classes at SAGA art studio in Gardena. Large and well-lit, it was comfortable little place located just off Gramercy Place and the very location that contributed most to my initial understanding of art. It was run by a young, quiet Japanese man I only knew as ‘sensei‘. Despite his penchant for the mysterious, under his direction, I dove head first into the world of art when we dipped tie-dye shirts on my first day there. Unfortunately my shirt was a horrible cavalcade of blue and purple; a positive mess. Let’s just say that as a young grasshopper, my artistic skills hadn’t quite surfaced yet.
Later on, we moved onto more interesting ventures, such as making animals shaped from soda bottles. I remembered that on one of those days, I drank an entire bottle of Crystal Pepsi (the transparent Pepsi that was a total commercial failure during the mid-1990s) on the car ride there and had make a beeline to the restroom on the second floor the moment we got to the studio. After that, however, it was all fun and games, as we all began to shape stubby little clay legs and a wrinkly trunk onto the Pepsi-shaped elephant body. Normally, my sister would be in the other, ‘big kids’ room painting her penguins and puppies, but that day, they all joined us in the fun. I’ve always sustained that my elephant was more anatomically correct than her elephant.
It was also at SAGA that I would watch Kevin Chao press mindlessly away at his Sega GameGear while waiting for his parents. Raylene also joined me on the sidelines, and would occasionally make a pun on the pronunciation of ‘chaos’ in the game “Sonic in Chaos”. I found it mildly amusing, but perhaps that’s why both of us had the ‘nerd’ moniker bestowed upon us throughout school — but I digress.
So, back to ‘sensei‘; he was one of those introverted, talented artists who spoke little English to boot. Every single time we would take our works to him, he’d silently go to work, transforming our disaster pieces into works of art. He made the eyes on my fox just that much shinier, and its red coat just that much more textured. He was THE fixer, able to touch up anything in a few seconds’ time. Yet, his personal artistic pursuits were certainly not limited to molding animals from putty. On one of my final days at SAGA, ‘sensei’ held a personal art exhibition. His own works were more akin to those of Jackson Pollack and the Irascible Eighteen than to my best Van Gogh impression of a sunflower, and that was my first realization of the huge range of human expression in art. I went onto other art studios, and have now settled with photography, but I still have my red fox stashed away somewhere in our old garage. Its nose fell off, but I do believe I filled the void in with a black sharpie.
