Divine Gardens by Mayumi Oda

Author:Mayumi Oda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Parallax Press
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

DANA VELDEN

Writer, author of Finding Yourself in the Kitchen, Oakland

One of the things I love about Mayumi’s work is that you can tell it’s made by hand. In our day-to-day life, we grapple with so much that’s not of the natural world—so much that comes to us through machines and through our devices. So when I find myself in front of a piece of art that’s made by hand, it’s astonishing what happens. My entire body relaxes.

I’ve never met Mayumi, but I can remember when I first became familiar with her work. It was on the covers of those early San Francisco Zen Center cookbooks—The Tassajara Bread Book, Tassajara Cooking, and Everyday Greens. I started cooking from those books in the 1980s, and in the early 1990s I visited the Zen Center for the first time. I had traveled from Wisconsin to be a guest student at Green Gulch Farm, and Mayumi’s work was hanging up here and there. Her imagery, her sense of color, and her sense of line became part of my introduction to Zen.

When I moved to San Francisco and I became more involved with City Center, her work became synonymous with my time there. When I lived at Tassajara during the summer, I worked in the bookstore where her art was for sale. I remember how much I liked handling her work, being careful to not crease the fragile paper, and what a delight it was to send a piece off with a guest as a memory of Tassajara.

The combination of her images and the way she uses flat space and flat color all comes together in such a delightful way. I associate Mayumi’s work not only with the Zen Center but also with food and cooking, which is a big passion of mine.

At one time or another all of her Seed Catalogue prints have been favorites, but lately I’ve been looking at the Golden Beet print. With the other two prints in the series, the purple cabbage and the green cabbage, the images completely fill the space. With Golden Beet there’s more going on: the rain in the background, the earth where there are little bugs crawling around, and the beet itself has all these little root-like hairs. It’s beautiful but also very real—it shows the bugs and the rain and all those wonderful things that it takes to grow the beet.

The connection with the natural world that Mayumi has, this intimacy, reminds me to always look closer, to pay close attention. This inspired my book Finding Yourself in the Kitchen, which is based on the idea that the kitchen can be a great place to practice, in part because there’s so much beauty to be found there. Especially the ingredients we work with. You cut into a purple cabbage and you see that fascinating pattern and array; or you pick up a bunch of beets and there’s that gorgeous red color…or even something like a potato, which you don’t perhaps think of as beautiful, but if you look closely and handle it with great attention, you can find its beauty.

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