Garden Bay artist-run gallery the result of hunger for harmony

The painter behind a Garden Bay gallery whose crystal anniversary celebration was annulled by the COVID pandemic has made peace with the missing milestone, instead intensifying her quest to build relationships through art. 

For only two months each summer, Motoko’s Original Fine Art Studio and Gallery maintains regular visitor hours. After its annual mid-September closure, Motoko continues to welcome clients by appointment to the gallery, whose serene exhibition space is located on the ground floor of her home. 

Dozens of her acrylic paintings, primarily abstracts, are positioned with generous margins between each canvas. Soft music and the faint trickle of falling water foster a meditative atmosphere aligned with the Zen principles that guide Motoko’s work. 

“I think my role is to create a little piece of tranquility and happiness in a person’s life and home,” said Motoko, who uses only one name in professional settings.  

“If I can do that for a person, then I have achieved my goal. Basically what I’m creating is not what you actually see visually, but an essence — the nature of nature, whether it’s moss in the forest or a glacier where light passes through millions of years of ice so condensed that it glows in blue. My goal is to capture that essence and to pass it on to people who look at my art.” 

Motoko emigrated from Japan in 1994, settling first in Vancouver before moving to the Sunshine Coast. She was 29, a trained dietician whose parents subjugated her childhood propensity for art to work in the health care sector. “Working in the hospital was very dreadful,” she recalled. “I did not like it and I always knew I wouldn’t like it. I wanted to apply to art school in Japan, but my father said no. He picked a college and said, ‘This is where you’re going.’” 

Once in Canada, the self-taught painter obtained commissions from boat owners to depict their vessels in watercolours and oils. “People are so fussy about their boats,” she chuckled. “I mean, I tried to be artistic about it, but they get so caught up with how their mast should look, or that a flag has to fly a certain way. I thought: no, this is not what I want to keep doing.” 

She supplanted her boat portraits and realist landscapes with abstract paintings. Their radical simplicity and deliberately-restricted palettes of vivid colours attracted buyers in the urban galleries where Motoko first marketed her work.  

But she craved a more intimate relationship with her patrons. In 2005, with encouragement from her husband, she launched her gallery in Garden Bay. She now sells her paintings directly and maintains a client database with thousands of names. 

“I get to know my customers,” she said. “There’s much more than just a customer-artist relationship there. It’s more like they become my family through my art, because they have my children — my paintings — in their homes.” 

Motoko was at the vanguard of owner-operated galleries in the Garden Bay area and planned to commemorate her 15th year in operation. Then COVID struck. “I had to cancel everything,” she said. “Now it’s been two years and we are just sort of slowly recovering.” 

Motoko finds inspiration in nature’s rhythms, sublimating shifting landscapes through works like her Wind and Fire series and Ebb Tide. By applying successive layers of acrylic paint in paintings such as Solstice and Shine, she creates multifaceted textures apparent even in giglée-printed doppelgängers.  

Early this year she donated a collection of works, Hope for Ukraine, created in response to the war in Eastern Europe, that together raised over $16,000 for relief agencies. 

“I don’t need to be famous,” said Motoko. “I just want to be successful with each customer. If my painting speaks to that one person so much that it makes them feel happy or even makes them cry, that is the ultimate success.” 

Motoko’s Original Fine Art Studio and Gallery remains open Tuesdays to Saturdays until mid-September. Details are available by browsing to motoko.ca.