Hiroki MORINOUE

Hiroki Morinoue was born in Holualoa, Hawaii in 1947, where he still lives today.  He received his BFA from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1973.  As he refined his personal artistic vocabulary in the early 1970s, Morinoue decided to further his studies in Japan.  From 1976 through 1982 he studied sumi brush painting and woodblock printing with a Masters in Japan, respectively Koh Ito Sensei and Takashi Okubo Sensei.  In 1979 Morinoue opened a gallery with his spouse, Setsuko Watanabe Morinoue named Studio 7 Fine Arts.  Hiroki Morinoue’s prints are colorful renditions of an abstracted vision of nature.  Water and sand play primary roles, but shells, abstracted horizons, and increasingly a reflection on our consumption’s influence on nature, and the Brazilian rainforest and its trees, are depicted in Morinoue’s color woodblocks.  His simple shapes are elegant, while his lines tend to be carved to lend his graphic works a painterly effect.