Blue Ocean Moons suggests abstraction of patterns of light reflecting on the moving surface of water, perhaps a tidal pool. Kuraoka uses graphic imagery, broken down to its simplest form, to imply subtle motion of wind and moonlight on water. He offers his interpretation and welcomes the viewer’s involvement and own memories and personal experience with water.
Blue Ocean Moons by David Kuraoka, 2010, Ceramic
(located on the wall immediately to the right of the Helumoa entrance to promenade)
Originally from Lihue Kauai, David is an artist and an educator, actively involved with clay for five decades. While attending college on the mainland, the influence and energy of Hawaii’s way of thinking, feeling and seeing carried with him. Now retired from teaching, David spends daily life working in his Kauai studio. Early art influences at San Jose State University immersed David in the minimalist movement that followed abstract expressionism. He earned degrees in painting, sculpture and ceramics, and chose to focus his Master of Arts graduate studies in ceramics. David was awarded a PhD equivalent by San Francisco State University for his research in Americanizing raku, where he made simple, elegant forms subjected to raku and primitive open pit firing. David’s design philosophy in creating ceramic sculpture recognizes the beauty of natural forms, combined with a visual language that he believes is universal. His work is abstract, his style simple, clean and crisp — a style for which he coined the term “California Slick.” David’s forms and surfaces owe much to a lifetime in Hawaii’s rich natural surroundings. David was named a Hawaii Living Treasure in 1987.
