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Artist Joan Mead-Matsui exhibits new work.

’Endless Mountain Daylily Farm.’ circa 2009 by Joan Mead-Matsui. The farm is located in Clarks Summit.

Courtesy Joan Mead-Matsui

Joan Mead-Matsui

To get from Northeastern Pa. to New England, most people take Interstate 84; Joan Mead-Matsui is going through Japan.

Mead-Matsui’s collages of torn, colored paper, made using a Japanese technique called chigirie, are on display at the Wenham Museum in suburban Boston as part of “Paper Capers: Adventures in Paper Art,” an exhibit open through May 9. The Ransom Township artist, who also serves as a correspondent for The Abington Journal and Times Leader newspapers, is attending a special curator’s talk and gallery walk at the museum Saturday morning.

“The pieces (at the Wenham exhibit) represent a variety of subject matters including art inspired by vacations to Massachusetts and images I took while in Japan,” Mead-Matsui, 48, said. “The lush, green countryside of Japan, as well as its traditional clothing, architecture and food, have been particularly inspiring.”

Visually comparable to watercolors, chigirie – pronounced chee-gee-ree-aei – is a passion for Mead-Matsui, who first learned about the art form while browsing out-of-print Japanese books during a 1996 trip to Seattle with her husband, Kuni, a native of Kyoto, Japan.

“Chigirie is such a unique art form and it’s really my niche. It allows me to do with paper what I have never been able to accomplish with a paintbrush and paint,” Mead-Matsui said. “In Japanese culture or language, chigirie literally means ’to paint with paper.’ The dyes in the handmade Japanese paper I use blend or meld together so at first glance, one would think it’s a watercolor.”

Last fall, Jane Bowers, exhibitions curator of the Wenham Museum, reached out to Mead-Matsui with an offer to include her chigirie in the Paper Capers exhibit.

“Joan Mead Matsui’s work is the best torn paper collage art I have ever seen. Her pieces are very much like fine Impressionist paintings – they are inspired,” Bowers said, as she heaped added praise on the Mead-Matsui work, “The Red Barn,” which features a New England-style barn set among pine trees. “Using nothing but bits of colored paper, Joan has managed to create light, shadow, depth, contours, textures.”

Mead-Matsui, who has had her work featured locally in Scranton’s First Friday celebrations, other public art installations, and art showings in Seattle and New York, welcomed the opportunity for her art to reach a new audience.

“I felt honored,” Mead-Matsui said of her inclusion in the Wenham exhibit. “Participating in this exhibit is somewhat of a dream come true for me. It’s not something I’ve actively pursued and yet it happened, so I view it as one of life’s great surprises.”

Bowers, who characterized attendance for Paper Capers as “great,” said the exhibit was inspired in part by “One Sheet of Paper,” a contemporary art exhibit held previously at the Hirshorn Museum in Washington D.C. In addition to chigirie, other paper art disciplines chosen for “Paper Capers” were: papier mache, molded paper, quilled paper (paper filigree), embossed designs, 3-D collages, among others.

“I looked for the best contemporary artists I could find who used those techniques to make art. The exhibit has amazing diversity in the art visitors will see,” Bowers said, adding that the mission of the museum mandates all of its exhibits have both historical and educational significance with a focus on childhood and family life.

“The final result is an exhibit that is about both art and history, and with the interactive components that allow visitors to make their own art right in the gallery – like cut paper silhouettes, embossed paper, origami, and more – we allow people of all learning styles to have a great museum experience,” Bowers said.

Though Mead-Matsui has always been fascinated with paper art, she traced her current artistic interests to a 1993 trip to Japan where she became enamored with origami, the art of Japanese paper folding. She made the interest into a business, Mrs. Matsui’s Origami, in 1995.

Her paper art business led to a subsequent offer to teach in the school arts’ program at Abington Heights Middle School. It was during this time that Mead-Matsui taught herself chigirie, which she slowly incorporated into the art shows at which she presented her creations. Eventually, the collages became part of the artwork for sale.

Mead-Matsui also desires to teach chigirie to eager students. Much like the art itself, the task of teaching it is more complicated than it appears.

“Since most of the supplies I import from Japan, or purchase from companies that export the paper, glue and ‘palette’ from Japan, this craft is almost cost-prohibitive to teach,” Mead-Matsui said. “I’m adamant that I want to teach the traditional art form using the correct glue and handmade Japanese paper.”

By selling more than 100 various artistic creations over time, Mead-Matsui has been able to reap financial rewards from her art. She credited her late friend Karen L. Yahara of Sasuga Japanese Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass. with providing her the first opportunity to sell artwork outside of Pennsylvania. The two women met online, but the interaction was a result of a recurring theme in the life of Mead-Matsui: Asian culture.

“The art evolved as a result of my life-long interest in Asian culture and my marriage to a man of Japanese heritage,” Mead-Matsui said. “My late father, Warren Mead, participated as a marine in the occupation of Japan towards the end of World War II. He shared some stories of his time in Japan, particularly those of his Japanese girlfriend whom he met in Japan before marrying my mother. I met this woman in 1993 in Sasebo, Nagasaki, Japan. Perhaps these ’occurrences’ have had something to do with my evolution as an artist practicing a Japanese art form.”

In addition to her paper art business, journalistic pursuits, and volunteering her public relations expertise and organizational skills to several community-based projects, Mead-Matsui spends time at yoga practice, playing tennis, going hiking and skiing, and fishing with her two young children. She notes that all of these activities help provide her a fulfilling life experience.

“I am so incredibly happy writing for the newspapers, helping with public relations, and learning and practicing an art form that appeared to me on the cover of an out-of-print book that was written in Japanese,” Mead-Matsui said. “As I officially enter middle age, I look back on life and sometimes tears form in the corner of my eyes when I think about how much I’m enjoying what I do.”

If you go:

“Paper Capers: Adventures in Paper Art” – through May 9

Gallery Walk: Saturday, Mar. 13, 10:30 a.m.

Wenham Museum,132 Main St., Wenham, Mass.; (978) 468-2377

www.wenhammuseum.org