“Drawings for Means” That Produce Purpose 

Written by Susumu Takashima 

Most human activities, especially work, have purpose and means. We first decide on a purpose and then think of the means for attaining that purpose. In what I do, however, the original purposes shift and mutate, and often times I am either delighted or disappointed by unforeseen results. I believe that this is because means contain multiple latent sweet spots and the sensations they cause, like organisms, produce other purposes that may lead to unforeseen directions. I also believe that purposes produced by means and not the original purposes contain matters that should be reconsidered, and that they hold possibilities that could lead to new discoveries. 

My works are all drawings for tools and mediums that express means for drawing lines, with titles such as “Drawing for Brush, Acrylic Paint, and Paper,” “Drawing for Pencil Sharpener, Colored Pencils and Canvas” and “Drawing for Metal Point and Paper.” 

Lines that are made with brushes dipped in paint are widest at the beginning and gradually become narrower while becoming faint. Meanwhile, lines made with colored pencils and metal points are drawn with tools that are sharpened before being used; these lines are narrowest at the beginning and gradually become wider. I create my works by repeating and emphasizing lines that change in width, and by doing so, I am expressing that tools, which are means, can become purposes produced from means. 

What my works emphasize is that the tools I use are writing tools that create lines that change in thickness. This is a latent sweet spot that I discovered that veers away from the tools’ original purpose, which is writing. I believe that all tools have in them latent sweet spots; if these can be discovered they can lead to new forms of expression that expand the expression. Also, new tools are continually being created through industrial production; this could indirectly lead to the expression of the age in which a tool was developed. For these reasons, I believe “art for tools and mediums” has myriad possibilities. 

Purposes created by means have the potential to warp the original purpose. Because of this, means need careful attention. Perhaps it is in means that beauty is needed. The theme of my work is creating “drawings for means” that produce purpose. 

Line by line, delicately drawn with brushes and ink or colored pencils, Susumu Takashima’s drawings curl, unfold, and coil with a mechanical delicacy that evokes the automatic action of breathing. Just as our lives shift paths from original objectives and plans, art begins with a mark and ends in another with endless possibilities and uncertainty in between. The possibilities of Takashima’s work begin with his artistic tools — lines of inked brushes that gradually become narrower and fainter with repetition and markings of colored pencils that grow wider with each stroke. Conceiving an artwork that is at once automatic and purposeful, Takashima evokes the process of inhalation and exhalation as an automatic, yet deliberate action to sustain life. 

Looking at Takashima’s art, one sees as Jean-Thomas Tremblay aptly writes in the preface to this issue that the artist does not attempt to render breath as visible, but rather evokes qualities of respiration — the feelings one encounters when one considers their own breath or is touched by the breathing of another. Drawing for brush, ink, and paper,  Ⅰc（yang）violet: green: orange=6: 1:2, follows its violet, green, and orange swirls that slowly fade out of grasp where the tightly controlled markings meet an illusionistic pit of approaching darkness. Here, the lines are suggestive of thinking and feeling breath as simultaneously in one’s grasp and beyond, encompassing the meditative control of our breathing as well as opposite states of anxious panic or even ecstasy. Takashima writes respiration in its many iterations and experiences, just as poetic lines capture the undulations, pauses, and annunciations of breathy thoughts and feelings. 

- Jessie Elizabeth Alperin

Susumu Takashima’s works are drawings made with brush and ink, colored pencils, and metal point, all materials that create lines that change in thickness. Takashima was born in Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture in 1959 and grew up in Kakogawa City, Hyogo Prefecture. His father was an architect. Between the ages of five and twelve, he attended an art class taught by Keihachiro Fujimoto, a disciple of Masakazu Horiuchi, the pioneer of Japanese abstract sculpture. There, he learned his current technique of drawing parallel lines in freehand. His notebooks from his teenage years are full of line drawings made with this technique. However, he felt dissatisfaction because he was still drawing with ballpoint and felt-tip pens, both of which produce lines with constant thickness. After graduating from the Department of Architecture at Musashino Art University, he studied painting at Musashino Art School for two years and at Instituto Allende in Mexico for one year. In 1989, Takashima noticed that lines made with brushes just dipped in ink naturally gave works depth as they became thinner. In the following year, he discovered that lines made with colored pencils — inverse lines made with brush and ink — were thinnest immediately after sharpening and became thicker thereafter. It would take him roughly eight years of trial and error to succeed in creating works based on his discoveries. In 2000, he won a grand prize at the 14th Fine Art Exhibition in Tama, and his work is in the collection of Ome Municipal Museum of Art. Today he regularly holds exhibitions in Tokyo and San Francisco, while exhibiting at art fairs in Japan and other countries.