Thanks for 12 great years!

“the redwood path” is 11x14, made with acrylic paint, washi paper, silver foil and glue on cradled birch panel. It was inspired by a hike that went a little later than expected. © Annette Makino 2022

Gosh, so much has happened lately! In December alone, my husband Paul and I visited the Galapagos and mainland Ecuador, I finally caught Covid, I won a $10,000 Jacoby Award for Humboldt County artists, a violent earthquake damaged our house, and we hosted extended family for the holidays.

January brought a series of intense winter storms, repeatedly knocking out our power and water. We continued earthquake repairs and I tackled my dreaded year-end business accounting. In February we were treated to a very unusual event: several snowfalls right here on the coast! Meanwhile, I’ve been exploring new art techniques, writing and publishing haiku, and reorganizing my studio—while getting pounded by a fresh series of atmospheric rivers. I’m currently in Portland, Oregon, where I visited the serene Portland Japanese Garden and saw an inspiring show of Japanese woodblock prints.

I won’t go into detail on all that here—photos and more detail on most of these events can be found on my Instagram feed and the Makino Studios Facebook page. But this is just to say that although I’ve been bit preoccupied, I haven’t forgotten you, my friends and fans!

This Saturday, March 18, is the 12th anniversary of Makino Studios. What a privilege to have spent the past dozen years as a working artist, sharing my creativity with the world. In thanks for your ongoing support, I am offering 15% off everything in my shop. Use code 12YEARS at checkout through midnight this Sunday, March 19.

Who knows what new twists and turns the coming year will bring—tornadoes? zombies? I only know that I’m grateful to be able to walk the artist’s path.

the redwood path
absorbs our footsteps
moonlit ferns

Paul and I just casually hanging out with a Galápagos penguin, as one does.

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Makino Studios News

12th anniversary sale: Cards, prints, books, calendars—take 15% off everything in the shop except original art, using code 12YEARS at checkout. Offer ends at midnight this Sunday, March 19.

Pizza and Pottery Festival: Mark your calendar for 11-5 on Saturday, May 6, for this lovely small fair with wood-fired pizzas and other goodies plus live music. 135 Sunkist Lane, off Glendale near the Blue Lake Murphy’s Market.

Calendars: My last 2023 mini-calendars of art and haiku are now on sale for $6.99 (from $12). You’ve still got most of the year to enjoy one!

Skipping Stones: It’s always an honor to have a haiku selected for the Red Moon anthology of the best English-language haiku of the year. Here’s one of mine that made it into the 2022 edition:

Covid variant
another wave sucks the sand
from under our feet

(First published in Mariposa and in The Haiku Way to Healing: Illness, Injury and Pain)

A New Resonance 13: A longtime dream has finally come true: I've been chosen as one of the 17 haiku poets to be featured in this landmark series published by Red Moon Press. I will have copies available for sale in June, featuring a wide variety of emerging voices in haiku.

What we've survived

“bright green needles” is 8x10 and is available as a greeting card. © Annette Makino 2021

Well, it feels like we are finally turning the corner on the COVID-19 pandemic. My family is fully vaccinated, along with 40% of Americans, and I feel an expanding sense of relief. 

My husband, son and I took advantage of our newfound freedom by driving to San Francisco last week. I have been craving artistic inspiration, so we hit two museums and two galleries in three days. We also visited the Japanese Tea Garden, the new Salesforce Park, Chinatown, North Beach and the scruffy, artsy SoMA neighborhood, walking eight to ten miles every day. 

San Francisco
steep streets spilling
into the bay

It was rejuvenating to leave home for the first non-essential trip in fourteen months, and to experience the energy of urban life. Outside many restaurants, pleasant outdoor booths line the streets in place of parked cars. Some eateries offer customers QR codes to snap with their phones instead of touching old-fashioned paper menus.

city maze
falling in love with
the GPS man

But we were shocked to see how hard the city has been hit by the pandemic. Whole blocks of Chinatown are mostly shuttered and many restaurants have gone under. Even big national chains in prime spots have closed, like the giant Uniqlo and Gap stores near Union Square. The tourists are slowly starting to return, but it could take a long time for downtown to recover. 

Back home, we are not out of the woods. Though Humboldt County fared well earlier in the pandemic, now with the spread of the more contagious B.1.1.7 variant, we have the worst COVID-19 case rates of all 58 California counties. The deaths and lingering side effects will haunt us for a long time, as well as the lost livelihoods and failed dreams of this brutal past year.

With all this in mind, I created the above collage haiga (art plus haiku). I used hand-painted and torn Japanese papers, sumi ink, prints made from ferns and redwood sprigs, and vintage Japanese letters from the 1920s. Though our scars may not always be visible, we have each come through a lot to get here. This  piece honors that struggle and the process of growth, and is meant to evoke a sense of hope and healing after trauma. 

bright green needles
on the fire-scarred redwood—
what we’ve each survived

Here’s to survival and new growth!

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“kingfisher” is 8x5. This collage of a female Belted Kingfisher was commissioned as the cover for the excellent new Kingfisher haiku journal. Check it out! © Annette Makino 2021

Makino Studios News

“The ultimate affirmation” - The Eureka Times-Standard ran a lovely feature on my Touchstone Award for haiku, including my process of writing poems and creating collages.

“Word and Image: Exploring Modern Haiga” - I will present this session on haiga, or art combined with haiku, together with Linda Papanicolaou, Editor of HaigaOnline, at the Haiku Society of America’s annual conference. This year’s event runs Saturday and Sunday, June 12-13, and is free via Zoom. Anyone can register. From the program:

Annette Makino will first share a brief slide show of some of her watercolor haiga over the past ten years. Her presentation will draw from the first full-length book of her art, called Water and Stone, with publication in Summer 2021. Linda Papanicolaou will then explain approaches to linking and shifting between the words and image in haiga, with examples. For the bulk of the session, participants will try their hands at writing haiku to accompany several provided images. There will be time to share the results of this foray into creating haiga. 

Water and Stone - I am close to finishing my book manuscript! This will feature my fifty favorite watercolor haiga of the past ten years, along with fifteen new haibun (autobiographical prose pieces with haiku). I’m hoping to have it ready in June or July.

Cards - My current card designs, including the new “bright green needles” design above, are available here.

2021 fairs and events - Northcoast Open Studios, which is usually held in late May and early June, will not take place this spring, but may happen in the fall. The North Country Fair on the Arcata Plaza is scheduled to take place Sept. 18-19 this year, if COVID-19 safety permits. 

Thanks - I really appreciate all the kind responses to my last post, “Big news on Haiku Poetry Day.”

Interesting times

“trust that the future” is 8x10, made of paper, acrylic paint, and adhesive on illustration board. It is available as a greeting card. A haiku version appears in my 2021 calendar. © Annette Makino 2020.

What an intense and stressful time we're living through: a fraught election, a worsening pandemic, economic distress, racial unrest and climate-driven disasters, just for starters. The year 2020 embodies the ancient curse, “may you live in interesting times.” 

Long-term, I honestly don't know if we will get through this as a species, especially at the rate we’re destroying our home planet and its climate.

lights out—
we discuss
our extinction

But just days before the end of the election, I am finally daring to hope. Massive early voting shows we may be amidst a sea change, a shift away from the politics of hate and divisiveness.

Voting in staggering numbers, young people especially are giving me hope. The three young folks in my house are closely tracking the election news and urging their social media followers to vote. My daughter and I have written several hundred letters and postcards to voters.

Meanwhile, when the stress becomes overwhelming, I try to take my own advice in the card shown above, part of my new collage series:

trust that the future
is already unfolding
from long-planted seeds

And if the election goes badly for us, we can always emulate the migrating birds:

campaign season
geese practice leaving
the country

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“lights out” was first published in Acorn, No. 45, Fall 2020

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Makino Studios News

NEW: Holiday notecards: I’ve made boxed sets of holiday notecards from three of my new collage designs. There are eight cards and eight kraft envelopes per box. These cards are also available as single 5x7 cards.

NEW: 2021 mini-calendar: My new calendars of art and haiku are now available online and in select local stores! They feature 12 of my new collages with original haiku. These make great holiday gifts!

Made in Humboldt fair: You can find my calendars, prints and boxed notecards at the “Made in Humboldt” event at Pierson Garden Shop in Eureka, CA from Tuesday, Nov. 10 through Tuesday, Dec. 24. This will be the only fair where you can find my work this season.

Seabeck Haiku Getaway: I will be giving a reading of my haiku and presenting my new collage haiga (art with haiku) at this annual gathering, which is being held on Zoom this year. This free event takes place this weekend, Oct. 30-Nov. 1. Registration is now open to everyone.

Sneak preview of the new collage collection

“fog becoming redwoods” is 8 x 10, made of paper, acrylic paint, and adhesive on illustration board. © Annette Makino 2020.

First of all, I want to thank everyone who responded to my last post (Big Changes in the Studio), where I shared my new artistic direction creating Japanese-inspired collages. I was genuinely uncertain whether this big shift in style and technique would appeal to my longtime fans and customers. 

But based on your enthusiastic responses, I have gone ahead and designed a line of fifteen new greeting cards based on my collages. These new cards should be back from the printer on Monday. To sneak a peek at the new collection, see this page of all my Makino Studios card designs. I’m excited to share my new designs for the holidays, birthdays, sympathy and more.

I’m also very happy about my new 2021 calendar of art and haiku. This is my eighth year of producing these—and my favorite yet. Arriving next week, these mini-calendars feature a dozen of my new collages along with original haiku.

I’m not able to do any in-person holiday fairs this year, and some of my retailers are seeing reduced sales during this pandemic. Consequently, I have printed 100 fewer calendars than usual. So order soon to be sure to get enough for yourself and for holiday gifts!

My collages, using discarded materials such as old letters and canceled checks as well as hand-painted washi papers, may be a fitting medium for this strange, disjointed time. In adapting to the pandemic, we are all having to gather bits and pieces from our old lives, then transform and rearrange them in unexpected ways. 

Please let me know your thoughts on the new collection, and enjoy! 

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“what remains” is 8 x 10, made of paper, acrylic paint, and adhesive on illustration board. © Annette Makino 2020. The haiku was originally published in With Cherries On Top, Press Here (2012).

Makino Studios News

Seabeck Haiku Getaway: I will be giving a reading of my haiku and presenting my new collage haiga (art with haiku) at this annual gathering, which is being held on Zoom this year. This free event takes place Oct. 31-Nov. 1. Registration is full but you can sign up for the Seabeck waiting list; the organizers hope to make room for more participants.

Made in Humboldt fair: You can find my calendars, prints and boxed notecards at the “Made in Humboldt” event at Pierson Garden Shop in Eureka, CA from Tuesday, Nov. 10 through Tuesday, Dec. 24. This will be the only fair where you can find my work this season, as the annual holiday fairs at the Arcata Community Center and Redwood Acres are canceled. My cards and calendars are also available in select stores.