by Susan Mehalick
Metroland

Twenty-five or 30 years. That’s how long artist Paul Miyamoto figures he’d been carrying around a pile of antique typographic sample boards that are featured prominently in some of his latest paintings. He found them in the garbage bin at a library in Ventura, Calif., when he was working as a graphic designer there for the central library system. He always thought he could somehow use them in his art — and now he has. The boards have been transformed into Miyamoto’s “canvas” for a collection of gouache paintings he’s created over the last two and a half years. The works, and other pieces by the area artist, are currently on view at Troy's Fulton Street Gallery.

“I had gotten to the point where I had hit a dry spell,” Miyamoto explains, and he found a certain inspiration in the old wooden examples of alphabetic and numeric typestyles. “I started painting over them — allowing the type from the board to show through as a background,” he continues. “That got my mind going and I began thinking of the possibilities for images.”

And thematically, he says he found himself drawn to ideas involving the night sky and driving. The former is somewhat of an ongoing theme in his works — “the idea of a curtain of night dropped in front of the day,” he says, while the images of the latter have been accumulating in his mind for a lifetime. “I love to drive,” he says. “I was raised in California. Then when I moved here, when I’d be following Sharon (his wife, visual artist, and Albany Airport Gallery director Sharon Bates) home, driving along Route 2 at night, I’d turn off the lights in my car and follow behind hers. It was a cool image, one that spoke about the loneliness of an individual traveling through this life we have.”

While deeper philosophical issues may surface in his work, Miyamoto says he’s striving for a certain kind of simplicity with his paintings. “I don't place a lot of images on a canvas,” he explains. “I try to make a simple statement. I feel the real play of art has to do with the interaction with the viewer.”

An artist's reception takes place tomorrow (Friday, Sept. 15) from 5 to 8 p.m. Miyamoto's work will be on display through Oct. 14. Fulton Street Gallery is at 408 Fulton St., Troy. Gallery hours are noon–5 p.m. Tuesday–Wednesday, Saturday; and Thursday–Friday noon–7 p.m. For more information, call 274-8464.

Article from the Metroland (September 14–20, 2000)

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