ROBERT KOBAYASHI: Take It Easy, Kid

16 October - 26 November 2025

ROBERT KOBAYASHI
Take It Easy, Kid
Exhibition curated and words by the artist's daughter, Misa Kobayashi
Kobayashi and Misa outside Moe's Meat Market c. 1990

ROBERT KOBAYASHI (1925-2015) traveled to New York City from Hawaii following WWII to study at the Brooklyn Museum School. Kobayashi was employed at MoMA as a caretaker of their Japanese House installation from June 1954 to October 1955, and worked there until he retired in 1978. After exhibiting with the AbEx artists at the Camino and Brata galleries, Kobayashi stepped away to explore materials and techniques informed by his personal history and immediate surroundings. In 1978, the artist purchased a building in Little Italy, transforming the former butcher shop, Moe’s Meat Market, into a studio/gallery. There, Kobayashi drew his creative energy and materials from the neighborhood, exhibiting a mixed media style dubbed “clouage,” composed of repurposed ceiling tin and metal cans. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the New York Historical Society; the Brooklyn Museum; and the Honolulu Museum of Art, among others.
Installation view of Robert Kobayashi: Take It Easy, Kid at Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC | Photo: Adam Reich
View of Ohio, 1PM

I tell people, “My Mom is from Ohio, my Dad is from Hawaii,” and of course, Hawaii always wins the beauty contest. She didn’t realize how affected my father had been by Ohio and the visits to her family until he titled some of his works after her aunt, and this piece after the state itself.

If you’ve never been to Ohio in the summertime, it is perfectly captured within this piece. The landscape has unbroken miles of sky and clouds, and if you’re standing on a patch of field that isn’t farmed or mowed, waist-high grass ripples like waves. There is a feeling of encroaching stillness—a total sinking into the experience of being wind-blown. There is no din of airplanes or helicopters that is unremitting in a city. My relatives lived rural-adjacent: not too far from the college town, and while you could still hear the train whistle blow, the bullfrogs were just as likely to keep you up with their bellowing. There was a man-made pond which reflected the sky like a silver mirror, with tadpoles that scattered at the approach of a shadow.
It was a culture clash for my Japanese-American father to meet my mother’s German-Irish, mainland-rooted family. My father’s reticence never allowed him to acknowledge the struggle it must have been to find his place within her family. Ohio had to have been very foreign in its unending flatness when compared to the mountain ranges on O'ahu that are visible from almost every part of the island. I don’t remember Dad talking about Ohio to me, but the last trip we took there as a family, I would see him standing at the edge of the pond with his hands in pockets, contemplating the wooden gates that kept the horses in. The animals themselves would appear once in a while to look back at him, a stranger in a striped shirt.

At 1 o’clock during summer in Ohio, the sun is an undiluted gold, and the air is hot and fragrant with everything growing. The serenity and boundlessness of the landscape seem precious and permanent. I can see why Dad wanted to commit this spectacular remoteness in a work of art; there is almost none of that to be found in New York City. I chose this work because of its beauty and also because of its title - my father surprising me yet again with his choices. The farm in Ohio still exists, but it’s much different. The wooden posts that were kicked in and gnawed on by the horses that clustered in the patches of grass are long gone, as are the horses themselves. The family he met many decades ago is mostly gone now, too. But looking at the painting, even if its landscape has changed and my father is gone, I am led immediately to that moment in time, watching my Dad watching the landscape, painting in his mind this work that followed.
Dad Collab, Misa Kobayashi and Robert Kobayashi

Dad Collab

Elizabeth Street was omnipresent in my life, down to the gritty construction sand my Dad helped himself to from a building site on the corner of Elizabeth and East Houston, where the first generation of bland semi-high rises started to go up. He was trying to solve the dilemma of both how to keep an eye on his kid and focus on his art at the same time. The solution, for him, was simple: build a sandbox in the art studio. It was hewn from the same discarded MoMA storage crates that made up nearly all of the furniture in the apartment. During hide-and-seek, I would slide the closet door shut and stare at the iconic museum-blue umbrella stencils and FRAGILE warnings as I waited to be found. Dad made the sandbox to fit underneath the storage for his paintings, and I would play in the clumpy sand dunes after school while his music blared. He must have strategized when a good time to borrow a bag of sand was, because I remember being tersely summoned by him and marching up the block towards the gates that encircled the old parking lot. Dad went through and reemerged with a sack that didn’t look too heavy, but he said, “Ok, when I say go, go.” It turns out the bag was heavier than I was because when he handed it to me, I fell over. I think the plan was that I would make the getaway and Dad would do the talking. We wound up just taking it unnoticed. The sand made it back to the studio eventually, and I would draw shapes or make forts, and I can see Dad's profile like it's right in front of me: his glasses that were repaired so many times they were more tape than frame, his scarf thrown jauntily over one shoulder and his paintbrush poised as it waited for the right second to land.
He built himself a bench by nailing planks of wood on top of each other, minimal to the extreme. I remember the sound of scraping on canvas and the scent of mineral spirits that he doused old t-shirts with. I liked the sharp, sweet smell of it, and Dad would shoo me away, snapping one of the pieces of cloth in my direction and telling me to move it.

At some point, I think he wanted to test out if I was artistically inclined, so he built a miniature bench and easel for me. He started me on a small painting that had a background already filled in with grey and orange dots. I got started on oil paint, as Dad never used acrylic. He put the brush in my left hand and directed me to paint in a downward movement, not jab or drag. The result was the weird clown figure that is obviously an interloper amidst the pointillist background. It was our only collaboration. The studio was freezing, so if we had been painting in the winter, we would have both been sitting there on our narrow benches, hunched over in full outdoor gear, Dad stirring life into the small dabs of oil that would get stiff below a certain temperature. I don’t remember what was under the portion of canvas that got painted over, only that after a certain point, I got politely booted from the bench as Dad went and corrected the strange little face I'd begun. I wasn’t a good pointillist and probably frustrated that I couldn't immediately produce the same soaring canvases my father did: cats with comically human expressions, angels with their limbs draped over railings and walls, the velvety purple hue of curtains that are billowing forever. I do remember him teaching me how to dab the white paint on the edge of a painting trowel and drag it across whatever one wished to erase.

I didn't realize that Dad had saved the painting until the aftermath of moving to Brooklyn, and I found it neatly wrapped in the corner of a box. Our one artistic collaboration with a face of indeterminate gender, age, terrestrial (or extra) origin. My Dad and I, so much alike that we took totally different paths in our creative lives and choices. Epilogue: I've never tried to paint again. It's just not the same without a sandbox, Dad’s interjections on my technique, and the agony of an uncushioned block of wood for a seat.
Fleur-de-lis #4

This painting remains iconic for me in terms of Dad's works. It is something I strongly associate with his art when asked to explain what he made or what he painted. It used to give me a feeling of dread when I was a kid, and now I can see why: it has an unsettling surrealism in it, especially with the green light pouring through the windows and the alarmed stance of the chair, that seems like it’s trying to back away from the pall that is spreading across the floor.

The chairs in the paintings were the types of chairs we had as furniture when I was growing up - creaky joints and flimsy grains of wood. The same kind of cafe chairs that Dad would sit on during his time in Paris after the war, enrolled in art school and on his way to his destiny in New York City. Some of the chairs still exist in our house; a few still bear the mark of Dad's electrical tape repair hack because they were beginning to splinter. Another has a new seat Dad cut out from a painting done on plywood that someone had tossed, but I suspect that had more to do with Dad feeling sorry for the painting than actually needing to fix it.
The other detail that is contained within the painting and forever embossed onto the fiber of childhood and Elizabeth Street is the Fleur de Lis pattern that adorns the multi-colored walls. I spent the first months of life in the bottom dresser drawer that Dad had painted in Fleur de Lis. There was no space in their tiny bedroom for a crib, but needing to check on me at all hours, Dad put wheels on the drawer so it could be rolled neatly back in during the day. His Fleur de Lis was painted without a stencil, done freehand and remarkably steady in a peach hue and gray-green outline. When I outgrew the drawer and it was time for a room of my own, he built a vanity with a matching stool, both bearing the same pattern as my makeshift bassinet in a kind of continuity. Mom and I still have the footstool, which appears too low to be helpful, but is actually the perfect height for a family just a few inches too short to reach the shelves.
Race Car

Elizabeth Street gave up its parts for the car: the wheels were recycled from something found discarded, the seats upholstered in leather scraps from a glove manufacturer on the Lower East Side, the speedometer was a meat thermometer that had seen several Thanksgivings. It - the car - is the ultimate repurposed object. Dad wrapped the steering wheel in electrical tape and rigged a complicated mechanism on the underside of the car that allowed for a surprisingly smooth turning ratio. I fit inside the driver’s seat at a perfect 90-degree angle with plenty of room for my legs to grow over a few years. Velocity came from a three-pronged hook that Dad had made and fitted onto a corresponding bit he welded himself. That way, he could make sure I wouldn’t pedal furiously ahead of him, and also so that he wouldn't have to sacrifice the look of the car by making holes in it for my legs.
Bumps in the cement were pronounced, sometimes launching me a ½ inch into the air and making Dad stop, curse, and unjam the hook. Those sidewalks were still punished by underfunding and a brief moment in New York City history where they considered razing that entire area to make an inter-boro expressway. Sometimes chasms would form in the middle of Houston Street, and a helpful citizen would jam a construction cone down in order to warn drivers. Mean streets is what Dad would say after a particularly bumpy tumble. When the first whiff of gentrification happened and there was a spate of redoing the cement, the wet slabs were immediately descended upon by neighborhood kids who misspelled bad words and drew cartoon genitalia. Dad, caught up in the fervor of mischief, almost wrote something himself, but thought better of it when I asked if I might go ahead and etch something too.

Back to the car: it would scrape down the Bowery, Dad jogging lightly behind it. I remember the lines of men standing outside the several shelters (all gone now) waving and yelling, “Hey, kid,” because this was a routine for us. We became familiar sights to each other. One Christmas, it was one of the Santa Clauses that lined up who gave me a paperweight for a present. His name was Angelo, and he had a pretty good Santa beard on his own. I still have the paperweight.

Many things Dad built were as much for him as for me. The car was a challenge, with all of its components and mechanisms, and needing to recalibrate or retool when the going got too tough on it. My perspective from the car's eye view was looking back and seeing Dad’s knees go fast and hearing myself scream with laughter. I never got a bicycle because it was deemed too dangerous, but getting pushed as fast as possible in a little fiberglass missile was allowed. Sometimes we would park it outside the bodega to grab a soda and continue on our way around the Bowery and all the way down Elizabeth Street towards Canal. To the neighborhood’s credit, it was never stolen.

The car has been moved and sat in by generations of kids now, from the kids I nannied to my nieces as small children. It’s worn and scuffed, with dents and chipped paint. Dad’s copper handle, which he soldered onto the back, remains pristine, as have the kid leather seats and the steering wheel. Art can be difficult to define, but it's hard to argue that it isn't to be found in an object with such purpose, history, and panache.
Cat Peering Through the Door

Moving out of Elizabeth Street was a Herculean task: all of Dad’s work had to be catalogued, wrapped, and stored. We preserved his worktables to the best of our ability, installing them in the new basement in varying states of wholeness. We kept his supplies and his tools—the ecosystem for the artwork you see in front of you. There was one section of our basement that I had no memories of - it was for art storage of work that was much older than me. Cat Peering was one of those paintings, and when seeing it for the first time, I couldn’t believe that it was one of Dad's paintings and that it had been missing from my life all this time.

I had to make up for lost time by living with it, at least for a while. Situated between two defunct gas lights and right above my writing desk, it became the perfect complement to a house that was already crowded with other renderings of cat faces.
Having paused for a decade between starting and finishing, I wondered at which point Dad ended: the dots or the brush strokes. It’s a funny halfway point between his two styles, and I wish I had seen where the 1979 version started. When I got a cat of my own, in line with the feline-heavy theme, he would often peer from behind the curtain and mimic the painting’s expression of pointed, judgmental curiosity.

This piece is a celebration of the ability to still be surprised and delighted, even after I thought I knew Dad’s work like the back of my hand. I wish I could capture the adrenaline surge after unwrapping it, like I had discovered a new kind of species. The rest of Dad's cats in his paintings do not resemble this one at all. Perhaps a short-lived, one-time experiment. However, the Cat managed to keep me company during some of my most alone moments and the breakdown of social order during 2020. There is something very comforting about its inscrutable expression that didn't condemn or absolve me during the time of isolation.
Johnny Boy Lived There

It’s a very particular sight in Hawaii, this kind of structure. My grandmother had a house on stilts—a lot of houses on the island do. The last house my parents lived in before my father died was on a raised foundation, held up by beams, and the underneath was enclosed by white latticework wood.

Dad had an extremely contentious relationship with his mother, who died at 97 when I was about six years old. I was there when his sister called him and he got off the phone without emotion. My most vivid memories of my grandmother's house look remarkably like Johnny Boy: the tall white steps leading up to the front door, the long columns of the porch, the open gable of her roof, and the motif of the latticework-enclosed crawl space. Dad added the tin roof in the painting because it was always his dream to have a wooden house in Hawaii with a tin roof, so he could listen to the rain. In the painting, the house is settled in the middle of an empty field, very different from his childhood of dense clusters of small houses that multiple families would share; his respite from the commotion and heat as a kid was to sleep outside.
The setting of Johnny Boy feels like a blend of his work named after Ohio and O'ahu. Dad’s landscape lacks the mountain ridge, but captures its cloud formations. It feels like he was straddling two of his scenic daydreams in one frame: the sky vista of the Midwest and the architecture of his childhood—a bygone era of Hawaii that preceded rampant tourism. The street he grew up on still exists, but it’s intersected by a 4-lane highway and a series of strip malls. High rises now compete with the mountains in the backdrop, and Honolulu became, in his words, “a city of cranes.” I never considered what it must have felt like for him to watch this slow erosion of paradise into something else—a scramble to become a metropolis that the land itself seemed to deter by its unforgiving nature. Roads don’t last long, and if the vines and trees aren’t trimmed, highways are apt to be quickly consumed by the forest.

The kind of wooden houses that Dad articulated in this piece are fragile and tough; they are threatened by termites, but can withstand brutal winds. However, they, too, will eventually be lost to time. I didn't know that Dad wanted to go back home long before his illness. My mother unearthed a mockup of a house he wanted to eventually build in one of the valleys. It was long and open, plenty of space for visitors, and one huge stretch of tin for a roof.
Friendly Skies

Until this summer, I had only seen the plane hanging in my grandmother’s house, in the home office that was my grandfather’s. It was so familiar that it became one of those parts of a home that merges into the background. This past summer of 2025, my Mom and I were tasked with dismantling everything to put into storage because my grandmother had died several years ago, and it was finally time to. The plane was given to my grandfather 40 years ago because of his history in the Air Force, and it won a place of honor in his office window, placed right where it cast a beautiful profile in the sunlight.

I am constantly being introduced or reintroduced to things that Dad made that I had a cursory knowledge of or had no idea existed. For instance, I had no idea that the plane’s pilot will wave a big hello in tandem with the propeller being spun. It’s whimsical but also sophisticated: both motions are seamless, and somehow the half-circle waving motion of the hand makes it much more lifelike.
It’s a playful object, but Dad gave it to someone important to him, even if he would never be able to tell my grandfather directly how much he meant. Dad used to talk to me all the time as a kid about how my grandfather was a good man, a kind person. He never objected to the age difference or Dad being Japanese, and how it made my father sad when he died when I was a toddler, and would never see me grow up. He never mentioned these things to my mom, which is why I suspect the plane is much more than a toy plane. It was a token of love from a generation of men who couldn't talk about feelings well.

As a work, the plane is an evolutionary point between the race car with its salvaged parts and the tin that begins to make a regular appearance in Dad’s art. It has a quilted surface made of metal, with a gentle patterning of nails over a wooden base. It would be a few decades before Dad fully found his footing and approach in the tin, but the plane is a halfway point.
Cat Tail and Tie 1996

Dad’s transition from oil painting to tin is a singular memory of mine; I was around 9, and he unveiled something to my mother that was a total departure from anything he’d done before. Dad’s earlier tin pieces were often imbued with surrealism or humor sourced from the patterns on the rice or tea tins from the shops in Chinatown. He also did a lot of geometric abstraction, such as his Ionic Order works. He made some use of ceiling tin in earlier pieces, but nothing that would define it as his final, preferred medium.

Cat’s Tail was the last, large-scale oil painting he completed. I had grown up with his pointillism: the velvety, soft-edged appearance of the dots from far away, but up close, they were rigid and sharp-tipped. When I was very, very young, I saw a Seurat for the first time at MoMA and was confused and perplexed by the similarity with my Dad's work. "Daddy," I asked him while we did our rounds in the museum, waiting for my Mom to get off work, "Why did that man copy you?"
His studio as an oil painter was like an extension of our apartment. It was the entrance of what would later become Moe’s Meat Market gallery. Dad had a massive chest of drawers that smelled like sawdust and solvents. There were parts of his canvas stretchers, the hand planer he let me use on discarded blocks of wood, because I liked how it curled into ringlets. Repurposed jars of apple butter and tomato sauce that held mineral spirits and glue. He drilled a painstaking set of holes into the side of a 2x4 and set it upright to create his own brush holder, in the order that he preferred. Way before they came back into style, 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, if he was feeling moody. His oil paints were sprawled out into a pile, and the panes of glass he used to daub or mix looked like Impressionist landscapes. The studio only had two risers, and it would get so cold that it dried his hands to the point of cracking, which he bandaged in masking tape. In summer, the door was left open, and he taught me how to kill the stubborn, undeterred flies using a rubber band twisted around my thumb to aim like a pistol.

Dad's pivot from oil to tin was swift, at least in my mind. After he committed to the new style, I could no longer wander into the studio without shoes because I would get scolded 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 inside because of the toxic fumes. Dad's process became much noisier, with the tin clips and the hammering. The record player was replaced by a CD player that skipped frequently from the percussive blow of his mallet used to flatten out the tin. I had no idea the discipline it takes to change course so late in one’s art life, or the fearlessness and self-conviction required to abandon the familiar and plunge into a medium people hadn’t seen before.

Cat’s Tail is the marker of a threshold in Dad's career as an artist, and also how his work came to interact more with my life, as I grew more aware of it while growing up at the same time. To take on such physically challenging material in his early 70s is a remarkable, tenacious feat. The ability to wrestle beauty from sheaths of tin that could just as easily slice a palm or forearm open is a rare prize. It has taken me time to appreciate how the metal speaks within a work, but his pointillism is the work that I feel most vividly tethered to him by.
Morning Light

Morning Light is a work I had never seen in person until it resurfaced a few years ago. It looks both like and unlike his other tin pieces; it lacks the same thousands of perforations from the nails, and the tin was pre-painted, so he used the available colors. It is conceivably more of a painting than a sculpture, but it has the same stillness as though awaiting an entrance, that many of his other works have. Morning Light looks like a tableau of old Hawaii with dirt roads and the Dole cannery as the main employer on the island, a time before direct flights from the mainland. I don't know where the morning inside the work was dawning, but I assumed it was somewhere familiar in Honolulu. It was a shock to learn it was the view from the office of his childhood dentist—a fabled boogeyman whose atrocities were part of Dad’s morbid repertoire.
I always heard it as a Japanese man in a white coat who had a pedal-operated drill and didn’t use anesthetic, and, in my Dad’s recollection, was gleeful at signs of distress in kids. Dad said he got his teeth yanked, left screaming and bloody, while his mother remained indifferent to his agony. It scarred Dad emotionally, as did the bout of diphtheria, wherein nobody came to visit him in the hospital, and he was left with just a view of the door and window to the hallway.

Dad’s fear of losing his teeth overtook his dread of doctors and dentists, which is why he went four times a year as an adult to get them cleaned. I remember the man Dad would see, Dr. Yoshitomi, who wore three-piece suits with a pocket watch and would always shake my hand formally, bending down to meet me. He and my father were both part of a small diaspora of Japanese Americans who had come to New York City from all across the country.

Dr. Yoshitomi was also part of the Japanese population put into internment camps during World War II. I knew nothing about that part of his history until I started writing this, and my Mom told me. Dad enlisted so that his sisters and mother could avoid the same fate as Dr. Yoshitomi.

In retrospect, Dr. Yoshitomi’s impeccable bearing and dignity make sense in the context of having been imprisoned. There is something immense and defiant about rising above the dirt tracks of a barbed wire perimeter enforced by the government to a success story with a sweeping view of Central Park West, complete with gargoyles on the trim of the building.

I didn't know Morning Light until well after Dad died. He could wrest something so beautiful from a particularly cruel memory. It changed the way I looked at the work from every angle: whether each square inch of the painting had taken inspiration from something else that seemed so far-flung. I would have never put the two together. I imagine that Dr. Yoshitomi would have approved of the idea that, to look at his tailored suit and Central Park office, one would never have imagined the sacrifice it took to get there. Both his and my father's fates were those of a Japanese American in that era—men at the mercy of a hostile government, trying to build back what they could of themselves that had been taken away.
Vermont Window

My Mom recently showed me the photograph that inspired this painting. She and Dad were visiting a friend in Vermont, and this is his version of what he saw out their window. I had no idea that my father had even been to Vermont, let alone had a great fondness for it. When I decided to go to college there in the state in 2005, Dad was happy, bashful, proud. On the first school tour, I assumed Dad was also seeing the mountains and woods for the first time too. I’d never even camped in a forest before I got to school. On the inaugural back-to-school shopping trip to Walmart in the next town over, two hunters pulled into the parking lot with a deer carcass strapped to the roof of their truck with its tongue hanging out. My Dad was excited about the school—he wanted it to push me down the path of success as a writer. Both of our favorite features on the campus were the small slanted windows in the dorm.
There is something so hauntingly liminal about this painting. The light is a shade of an indeterminate hour - whether the day is starting or ending is unclear. There was a specific time of day in the winter months there when you could be opening your eyes to either first light or the beginnings of sunset. I recalled the feeling as soon as I saw the painting and title. I was two years old when he painted this, and it’s hard to think that life could have come so full circle — even the windows in the painting look similar to the ones in my Vermont room. Peaceful as the college was with the huge field right in the center of campus, it never achieved that subliminal solitude that Vermont Window holds for me. The visual effect of the work makes me want to kick off my shoes and ascend into the frame to get lost in the dense geometry of the wallpaper and impossible green of its grass.
Touchdown at Hilo

Everyone in New York City that day has their own 9/11 story, their own version of how beautiful the weather was that morning. Mine was my first day of high school, the first class of what was supposed to be the start of the rest of my life, the path to college. Ten minutes after the start of the period, the first plane flew into the tower. It took several hours for the school to fully concede that a terrorist attack and national emergency had occurred, and there was a scramble to dust off some protocol for handling a situation probably not even considered since the Cold War. There was the keening in the lobby of children who could not reach their parents, and now I recognize our teacher's stoicism as a form of shock. My Dad and sister, who lived in the same building as us at the time, emerged from the haze of 3rd Avenue. Dad clutched our transistor radio to his ear, his face completely poised as he raised the volume as loud as it would go. The stations had all erupted in everyone asking the same questions: how many, who, why. My sister was in a shock of her own because being late for an insurance appointment at one of the towers that morning saved her life. The dust visible from all the way down the street was partially from the rubble of the dissolution of two monuments believed to be indestructible, but also from the trudge of people all covered in the same dust as they moved uptown in a stream of beige-colored forms. Each step, bump of a shoulder, toss of a head, or wringing of hands would cause a plume to rise. The only noise I heard aside from the radio was the thousands of feet that marched in battered unison to destinations likely unclear. I kept looking at Dad to signal what we should do next, but the only communication between the three of us was to clasp hands so that we would not be separated.
My father enlisted in World War II, after Pearl Harbor, and after he was given the choice of going to war or watching his family - four sisters and his mother - get put into internment camps. He was sent to Europe after Paris and Germany had been leveled, and he described the war orphans scrambling to beg soldiers for food, shoes, money. I am sure he had seen the kind of dust we'd walked through already, the kind from the aftermath of total destruction that sinks into each line of the skin and surface. In 2001, none of us knew what the “after” was going to look like, but I am sure the images of the ruined European cities were at the front of Dad’s mind. Some artists might have delved headlong into darkness, but my father instead produced a body of work that was almost blisteringly beautiful. He had a reserve of images in his mind that he must have retreated to when things in front of him became too much. Places my mother never suspected had made an impression, such as her aunt’s farm in Ohio, and its fields of grass. Viewed against the larger body of his work, it's clear that these were his post 9/11 pieces. There is a spectacular continuity in the emerald green that the grass pieces vibrate with. In the face of hideous destruction, where the news images grew worse and more dire every day, my father chose to make beauty when he could find none.

Touchdown at Hilo is so textural and evocative that it is easy to envision stepping through the frame into the side of something unmarred by tragedy and wreckage. His grass pieces all have a portal-like nature that is a contrast to his paintings and earlier metal pieces. The grass works are beautiful for the sake of beauty, for an artist’s belief that beauty can heal, surge forward, propel movement in times of paralysis. So, my first class that was cut short on 9/11 was the first section of world religions, and we were supposed to start on the cycle of Buddhism and the process of death and rebirth. Dad's grass pieces sometimes contained hidden objects or strange perspectives, as though he kept trying to reframe a moment in time for himself that was constantly looping.
Flowers From the Rust Belt

I consider this one of the weirdest tin pieces Dad did after he made the decision to stay within the medium of ceiling tin. It’s very different from the series of flower sculptures he did during the same time period, shortly after September 11th.

I wanted to call this ugly when I first saw it at age 15–the unfinished metal almost mocked the soft-edged flower shapes. It was a classic case of “I don’t get it.” When the lights were off at the Moe's Meat Market gallery, the Rust Belt had a menacing profile, with its stems bent at Medusa-like angles. The physical texture itself was also a new kind of surface. While the painted tin had invisible edges and required full attention when handling, Flowers From the Rust Belt was treacherous in its entirety. The raw tin was abrasive and offered no reprieve from scratching or scraping. I gave it a wide berth because of its tendency to snag.

My mother agrees it’s one of the oddest works because of his choice to leave the metal looking so raw and unfinished. Being from Ohio, she says it captures the swath of states that it’s named after: brittle, blanched, stunted, parched.
Usually, Dad’s work has a self-explanatory beauty, full of color and a swell of nailheads just below the paint surface that glimmer. Rust Belt absolutely refuses to follow along; while the other sculptures are bursting with life, the flora in Rust Belt appears to be dying, with one last attempt at reaching sunward, while some have already wilted.

Maybe it’s being older, but I have found the poetry in the cluster of rusting, dying flowers. They look like a lost cause, but there’s still a fight in them. There is a defiance and battle between the nature of the material and its bracingly dull hue and the delicate way the flowers seem to be losing life. I knew my father had to take a long consideration about not treating the metal like the rest of the work, and the choice was mysterious and deliberate. Perhaps Rust Belt was an experiment in form and function, but also a grappling with his fear of not knowing what happens when we die or how the process is supposed to go. We, my mother and myself, still have boxes and boxes of ceiling tin that were left unused after she and Dad left for Hawaii. I don’t know what or who we’re waiting for, but most of the sheets of untreated metal now resemble the texture and color of Rust Belt, and I don’t know what that says about dying, exactly, but it eases the absence of the artist who will never return to use them.
White on White

In 2012, Dad was eighty-seven. That year was a furious burst of creativity, but he produced an especially haunting series of paintings, all in white. The only indication of shapes and images is the contrast of the nails into the tin; I remember thinking it seemed unlike him, whose work was usually steeped in color and gradient and very defined surfaces. These were like looking through snow or fog. The timing of these works is very important: it was the last truly healthy year of his life, and as though he knew he was in a race against time. It would be hard to debate the significance of the absence of detail and color. He worked tirelessly on them, and my Mom remembers him having a drive about them that was very different from his previous work. I saw them for the first time and felt a primal sadness.

I liken this last series of Dad’s akin to a supernova: a brief and blinding flare of a beginning and an end. The works’ painful beauty is a reminder of the proximity that his death was to these paintings. When Dad’s terminal prognosis came from a doctor whose blank and impersonal tone felt like acid poured on a wound, my father stood up to shake his hand and said, “Is that all?” My father’s dread of dying—stemming from early childhood and following him all the way until his death — squeezed itself into a brief and undramatic question. The quiet, staid dignity in White on White reminded me of the moment I witnessed Dad gather up all of his fortitude to face the inevitable and acknowledge the messenger.
Shortly after the doctor’s appointment, where everything we feared was confirmed, we left as a family unit for Hawaii without a return date. My father knew that he wanted to go home to die, however much time it would take. The end of his life came full circle—his art that incorporated the overwhelming visual beauty that is Hawaii, and his ashes to be returned in part to the beaches, mountains, and skyscapes that birthed him. He died with a view of the Ko'oolau mountain ridge and the rustle of the trade winds running through the palm trees. After he was gone, my Mom and I went back to Oahu; I saw the fog wreathe the mountains early in the day before it got burnt off by the sun, and it would look remarkably like the works from 2012, everything bathed in a vaporous hue of white.
She Grew Up in Front of Me

Dad held his titles close to his chest. I’m sure I asked him, “Hey, was this one about me?” I am just as sure he waved off the question. He hated feeling like he was being interrogated about buried meanings.

From the outset, my father and I were so much alike that nursery school was a lifeline because, in his words, “We’re going to kill each other.” I see him in my personality more as I get older, and the traits are often at odds: our senses of humor can be both generous and eviscerating, our stoicism either brave or just cold.

She Grew Up in Front of Me is a stark and unnerving portrait of myself—assuming that it is me and not giving in to Dad’s insistence that titles are just titles. The woman in it has a blank, far-off stare and an expression that feels more numb than neutral. The background feels tomb-like, while the tin appears ominous. I’ve always been uneasy with this work because of the dynamic I had the year he made it. But seeing it without the context of its heavy history, the work is mesmerizing because the subject herself seems mesmerized.
In 2007, I ran headlong into a series of mental health problems. There were different triggers or fuses, but the culmination of all of them was a hospital uptown, where my parents visited every day. Dad could be downright negligent about the state of his work clothes and errand outfits, but he had an outstanding sense of when and how to dress up when the time came. He showed up to each visit in his nicest coat, a wool black turtleneck, and pressed slacks. There was a rapport of mutual compassion between the patients and himself. Some even took to saluting Dad when he entered because he was a veteran. The dignity of his comport was as helpful for everyone else as for me. I'll never forget the feeling of looking down the hallway and seeing the familiar figure of my father, hands in his pockets, nonchalantly like Humphrey Bogart, and looking to all the world like he was just waiting at a crosswalk.

2009 was another crisis period for me, though it was a longer stay in another place. My Dad's bearing was the same, though it was harder for him to understand how we’d gotten to this point again. When I came home to live for a while, he and I never really talked about it, but the inherent sadness in the work would imply that Dad saw something change in me that I didn't catch.

By 2011, life was remarkably straightened out. I started college again, working full-time and paying my way through it. But perhaps it took the two years away from all the grief I’d given him that he could finally make something about the time we spent in turmoil as a family. More than anything, the work is symbolic of how well my father knew me and how well, with such clarity, he could see me.
Prince Street

This painting is one of the several mysterious angels that populate Dad’s work. Their theme is a consistent question of whether they are arriving or departing. The expressions on the angels themselves are ambiguous — if they are serene, under duress, or simply distracted. With Prince Street, is she fleeing over the wall or emerging from the cemetery that it encloses? I’m not sure that even Dad could answer the question — it would have to fall onto the viewer to decide, and perspectives could change on any given day. He had unequivocal opinions about almost everything, and struggled with people who fell squarely in the middle, yet some of his largest oil paintings featured celestial creatures with indecipherable intent. It’s still impossible to know if he knew whether he painted so many on purpose or just by coincidence — a subject matter he happened to like. I prefer to think that Dad, who’d never been to a regular church service and was made uncomfortable by pomp and circumstance, painted angels because they were far more complex and human than given credit for.
The wall in Prince Street is that iconic leaning brick wall around St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral; I watched it slump a little further and further down every few years. His rendering of its corners and the long stained glass windows of the church are the backdrop of my childhood. I feel particularly close to the painting now because of how true to life it is to the wall of the church, not to mention the very human-like struggle of the angel to either gain a foothold or prepare for a long fall.

Because the process of finishing Prince Street took a few years, I wonder if the angel’s journey became more obscured by time and layers of paint. Whether she started out with a clear path, and Dad is the one who changed his mind. It’s an interesting moment of whether to stay or go, and I find myself in that headspace a lot because I tend to freeze when faced with forks in the road. Dad had the discipline to quit or sacrifice things without looking back, but maybe all of that was transposed onto these beings with wings that seemed unable to fly, frozen in the struggle of where to go next.

I always imagined that the angel in Prince Street as on its way home and that somewhere in the slide down the roughened brick wall, out of breath and maybe in a Little Italy accent, saying “Take it easy, kid,” as it rushed to make its way home before the gates were closed.
Installation view of Robert Kobayashi: Take It Easy, Kid at Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC | Photo: Adam Reich
Portrait of Robert Kobayashi

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ROBERT KOBAYASHI: Take It Easy, Kid

ROBERT KOBAYASHI

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