INOUE Chizuko was born in 1924 into a family where neither mother or father were artists. Her artistic training began as a student at Sato Girls High School in Tokyo, from which she graduated in 1941. She attended classes at Hongo Art Institute and participated with a group of avant-garde artists in the Century Society. This led her to the more abstract form of art that she was to follow henceforth. She won a prize in 1950 for an abstract oil at the annual exhibition of the Pacific Painting Society.

In 1951 she had a two-man show with young Yoshida Hodaka, the youngest son of Yoshida Hiroshi. The two of them then attended seminars by printmaker Onchi Koshiro and this exposure developed her serious interest in printmaking. In June 1953 she and Hodaka were married. They moved into a house that Hodaka built in the garden behind the house of Hiroshi and Fujio. They lived there until 1967. Both of their children, Ayomi (1958) and Takasuke (1959) would be born in this time period, a period when both parents would be engaged in an extensive burst of block carving and print making. In 1967 the family moved to another house in Mitaka-shi, a Tokyo suburb. Fujio moved in with them. There in one studio the three artists - Hodaka, Chizuko and Ayomi - worked on their own separate styles.

Her early woodblock prints incorporated energetic themes, such as from music. Travels around the world brought in more color to her prints. Symbolism became evident in the 1960s, as it did in Hodaka's prints. Embossing became prominent in the late 1960s and in the mid 1970s she began used a mixed-media approach to prints, combining the use of a photo-etched zinc plate for image outline and woodblocks for color gradation and other effects.

Hodaka died in 1995. Several years later she created a work in his memory (Floral Tribute) using the woodblock and photo-etching technique, that incorporated her flower motifs against a blank yellow wall, which was representative of the wall series that Hodaka had created as his last print series.

Chizuko continued to hold exhibitions through the early years of this new century, one being in 2004 - The exhibition of Artists living in Tama, Tokyo. Her work was part of a major exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2002 - Four Generations of Yoshida Family Artists. For 40 years her work was selected for the annual CWAJ Print Show in Tokyo, one of the largest juried contemporary print shows in Japan held each October.

References:

Yoshida Hodaka: The magic of Art by Eugene M. Skibbe, Seascape Publications, 1997.

A Japanese Legacy: Four Generations of Yoshida Family Artists, Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2002.