Dad’s transition from oil painting to tin is a singular memory to me; I was around 9 years old, and he unveiled something to my mother that was a total departure from anything he’d done before. Dad’s earlier tin pieces were sometimes imbued with surrealism or humor sourced from the patterns on tins of rice or tea from Chinatown, or geometric abstractions, like his Ionic Order works. He had made sculptures with ceiling tin before, but his first piece of his final artistic era was a still life.

Cat’s Tail was one of the last oil paintings he made. I had grown up with his pointillism works: the velvety, soft-edged appearance of the dots from far away, but they were actually rigid, sharp-tipped deposits of pigment up close. When I was very small, I saw Seurat for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art and was confused why an artist who had copied my father was on display while Dad’s paintings were not.

His studio as an oil painter was like an extension of our apartment; that’s how familiar it was to me. It was the entrance of what would later become Moe’s Meat Market Gallery and of the old butcher shop itself. He had a massive drawer that smelled like sawdust where parts for his stretchers went, and the hand planer that he would let me shave discarded blocks of wood with while he worked. Repurposed jars of apple butter and Newman’s Own Tomato Sauce, which we got from National Wholesale Liquidators on Broadway, contained various levels of mineral spirits, water, and rubbing alcohol. He drilled a painstaking set of holes into the side of a plank of wood and set it upright to create his own brush holder, in the order that he preferred. For a long time, he had a record player balanced on top of the cabinet that played Edith Piaf or Rachmaninov or Nat King Cole or Japanese shamisen music. His oil paints were sprawled out into a pile, and the panes of glass he used to daub or mix looked like impressionist landscapes. His studio only had two risers, and it would get so cold that it would dry his hands to the point of cracking, and he bandaged them in masking tape. In summer, he would leave the door open and taught me how to kill the flies that always came in using a rubber band twisted around my thumbs to aim like a pistol.

The pivot from oil paint to tin was swift, at least in my mind. After he committed to the new style, I couldn’t wander into the studio without shoes on because he would scold me about the nails. The chemicals he sometimes used to treat the metal were caustic, and even though he never wore a mask, I was barred from going in because they were toxic. The process became much noisier, with tin clips and hammering. The record player was replaced by a modern CD player that skipped frequently because of the percussive blow of his mallet to flatten out the material. I had no idea the discipline it takes to change course in one’s art late in life, or the fearlessness and self-conviction to abandon the familiar and plunge into a medium that people hadn’t seen before.

Cat’s Tail is the marker of a threshold in my father’s career as an artist and also how his art came to interact with my own life, especially as I grew up. To take on such a physically challenging material in his late 60s is a remarkable, tenacious feat. To be able to wrestle beauty from those sheaths of tin that could just as easily slice a palm or forearm open is even more remarkable. It has taken me more time to understand the tin and to appreciate the way it speaks in a work, but the pointillism will always be the work that is tethered to the most vivid memories of my father, the artist.

- Misa Kobayashi