Etruscan Hunting Scene

George Miyasaki

George Miyasaki was inspired by the Etruscan wall paintings done in central Italy between the 8th and 3rd centuries in the tombs. The composition refers to birds, fish, horses, etc. covered with mosses, molds and Hawaiian and other graffiti scratched around the edges.

George Miyasaki was born in Kalopa, Hawaii on March 24, 1935. He arrived in California in 1953 with the intention of pursuing a commercial art degree at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. After a short time, he was persuaded by Manuel Neri, Bruce McGaw, and other friends to switch his major to fine arts. Miyasaki studied painting with Richard Diebenkorn, printmaking with Leon Goldin, and Nathan Oliveira introduced him to color lithography in 1956.

Miyasaki quickly grasped the basic concepts and produced a highly experimental body of color lithographs. A few of these lithographs were exhibited at the Fourth International Biennial of Contemporary Color Lithography at the Cincinnati Art Museum that same year. Miyasaki earned his M.F.A. from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1958, and the following year his work was included in the American Prints Today traveling exhibition. In 1961, a solo exhibition of his work was held at the Paul Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship for 1963 and traveled to Europe and it was during this time that he worked at Atelier 17 in Paris.

Between 1958 and1964, he was an Assistant Professor at California College of Arts & Crafts, Oakland. During that period, he was a visiting lecturer at Stanford University for one year. In 1964, Miyasaki joined the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley, where he retired as Full Professor in 1994 after three decades of teaching.