About this project

This project will enable Japanese emigre artist  Samizu Matsuki to be honored at the Salmagundi Art Club of New York City on October 20th 2011, for her pioneering realistic art achievements in 1970s NYC.

Matsuki's significance was in her returning the techniques of Western Classical Realism painting, as refined by Japanese art schools since the 19th century,back to the Westat a critical moment.

Samizu Matsuki  1970 Self portrait    Samizu Matsuki  photo in Maine USA, 2011

See  Samizu's wikipedia page  

Samizu, 75, now lives in Rockland, Maine on a very slender pension. In 1973 she was 1st woman & 1st Asian nominated and admitted to the centuries-old Salmagundi Club, in recognition of her gold medals-winning oil painting Triumphal Return and her other extraordinarily realistic yet subtly surrealistic works of early & mid 1970s, that so delighted thousands of visitors and onlookers at the great exhibition contests she entered and, to her own initial surprise, won! 

Click here for links to large size (2mb to 9mb) images of  Triumphal Return  and three others of her major works

However, after gaining the Gold Medal at the First New York International Art Show in 1970, the Grand Prix at the Locust Valley Art Show, Long Island, New York in 1971 and the Award of Excellence at the Abraham & Straus-Hempstead Art Show, "Long Island Art '74", illness and the aftermath of severe spousal abuse brought her art career to an early close, though she continues to paint an  occasional portrait for a loved one 

After decades of quiet obscurity, the Salmagundi Club has offered  Samizu  a once in a lifetime chance to be honored for her contributions four decades ago to the genre of realist art . Will you help her achieve this culminating, affirming moment?

Honoring too her home nation of Japan, where her father & mother, the educators  Satoru and Masue Matsuki, and the Womens College of Fine Arts, now called Joshibi University-of which she is a 1958 alumni - have kept aflame  appreciation for the western classical arts and philosophies.

To make her visit from Rockland Maine possible, Samizu needs  to pay for round-trip transport of 2 paintings to the Club for the October 20th event, one from Virginia and one from Maine, and roundtrip airfare and taxi fare for herself. Because of her frailness, she will be accompanied by her longtime companion.  She is seeking $1,000 dollars, to accomplish this.

Can you help make this dreamlike last hurrah for her possible. Samizu has been compiling all the knowledge and skills she brought to bear in her art, to impart to the painters of the future. Gaining this signal honor by attending the Salmagundi Art Club event honoring "First Women"  will make that longer term project  of passing on her  knowledge  much mnore likely to acocmpalish possible, too

Help bring a brief shining light to an unsung yet still living heroine of world art history!