Harry Tsuchidana

Harry Suyemi Tsuchidana was born on 28 May 1932 in Waipahu, a plantation town on Oahu in what was then the Territory of Hawaii. His parents had a two-acre farm where they grew eggplant and bitter melon. He described them as unable to read or write their own language but strong-willed and religious. His father left, and his mother raised him. Born with asthma, he could not play with the other children, so at about eight he began tracing comics, then drew portraits of classmates and his teacher, boxers on fight nights and the players in local pool halls. He had a brother and a sister, Toshie, who died at 28 in a car accident. He told everyone he was going to be an artist. In seventh grade at Waipahu Elementary he painted a tree against a red and blue background, and when his teacher, Mrs. Wong, said it was not a tree, he replied that it was his tree.

After graduating from high school he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and served from 1952 to 1955. He said a film, Halls of Montezuma, prompted him to join, and that service life gave him an "alligator skin" that later helped him cope with criticism of his art. While stationed in Japan he exhibited work at the enlisted men's club, and a second lieutenant arranged his transfer out of the infantry. In the club library he found a list of art schools in the back of a magazine and wrote to all of them.

On the G.I. Bill he studied at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and worked as a guard and custodian at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. A doorman at the Phillips Gallery became his informal tutor, telling him to measure distances, to study the geometry beneath Pierre Bonnard's color, and to study Cezanne and Seurat. He became friends with the abstract painter Karl Knaths and met Hans Hofmann. After hearing what he believed was his late sister's voice telling him to move, he went to New York without finishing in Washington and studied at the Brooklyn Museum Art School and the Pratt Contemporary Graphic Arts Center. In 1959 he received a John Hay Whitney Fellowship.

In New York he worked as a night watchman at the Museum of Modern Art and lived among Hawaii artists including Isami Doi, Tadashi Sato, Satoru Abe and Bob Ochikubo, the group associated with the Metcalf Chateau. He was the youngest and called himself more listener than contributor. His early abstract expressionist work had nature themes and organic forms. After returning to Hawaii, a spell in Los Angeles and a permanent return to Honolulu in 1972, he began the Stage Series in 1979: geometric, minimalist canvases divided by one horizontal line, with vertical lines meeting the top or bottom edge, whose proportions he refined for years before exploring them in countless color combinations. He also made densely lined monochrome drawings and prints such as Topographic Landscape and worked in printmaking and photography. He taught painting for many years in adult education programs at Kaimuki High School and Linekona, and for the City and County and the Honolulu Museum of Art. Into his late eighties he worked full days in his Salt Lake studio, often ending a day with around 30 finished paintings around his studio.

Tsuchidana was married to Violet, a schoolteacher, for 59 years. He called her his rock. Her teaching salary let him paint, and she never asked whether the work would sell. Their homes in New York and Honolulu became gathering places for pinochle, poker and friends. They had a son, Grant. To help support the family he worked about seven jobs in one year, including in a kamaboko factory, a Tupperware warehouse, as a dishwasher in Waikiki and as a night exterminator at the Sheraton. A sale of his art to the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts helped him buy a condominium in Salt Lake, plus a second unit for a studio, with advice from the developer and collector Pundy Yokouchi. Violet died in April 2017.

Tsuchidana believed in tenacity over talent and in working every day rather than waiting for inspiration, which he called a Hollywood habit. He described art as process rather than outcome, drawing on what he called the Eastern idea of drawing the bow and letting go rather than hitting the target. He likened abstraction to chess: once you learn chess you do not want to play checkers, because it has more moves. He spoke of balance and proportion as "musical for the eye," said he focused on becoming a good person rather than a successful artist, and responded to people who disliked his work by shaking their hands.

Tsuchidana belonged to the mid-century cohort of Japanese American artists from Hawaii who went to New York and took part in the modernist movement, and he outlived most of them, still working in his nineties. He pursued his Stage Series for more than four decades. His work is in the collections of the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Hawaii State Art Museum and the state Art in Public Places Collection, the Free Library of Philadelphia and the Museum of Friends in Walsenburg, Colorado.

He received a John Hay Whitney Fellowship in 1959. The Honolulu Museum of Art honoured him with Harry Tsuchidana: A Retrospective at its First Hawaiian Center gallery in 2016, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa mounted Harry Tsuchidana: Works on Paper in 2018. His work was included in the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts survey Retrospective 1967 to 1987 and in the Honolulu Academy of Arts book Legacy: Facets of Island Modernism (2001).

His first solo exhibition was at the Library of Hawaii in 1955. Later exhibitions included a 2014 Koa Gallery show honouring him alongside Bob Ochikubo, Satoru Abe, Isami Doi and Tadashi Sato; Harry Tsuchidana: A Retrospective (Honolulu Museum of Art First Hawaiian Center, 2016); Harry Tsuchidana: Forgotten Paintings (Hawaii State Art Museum, 2016), small textured works rediscovered in his apartment; Abstract Expressionism: Looking East from the Far West (Honolulu Museum of Art, 2017 to 2018); Colorforms at the Halekulani; and Harry Tsuchidana: Works on Paper (The Art Gallery, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 26 August to 5 October 2018), more than 80 drawings and paintings selected by Rod Bengston. He was profiled on PBS Hawaii's Long Story Short with Leslie Wilcox (recorded October 2016, first aired 31 January 2017) and in Hawaii Public Radio features by Noe Tanigawa.

Harry Tsuchidana died peacefully at his home in Honolulu on 20 October 2026, aged 94. His cause of death was not made public. He was survived by his son Grant and daughter-in-law Annie. His obituary said he will be laid to rest alongside his wife Violet at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.