Matsubara Naoko 松原直子, 1937-

Naoko Matsubara was born in 1937 in Tokushima, on the island of Shikoku; but grew up mostly in the city of Kyoto. Her father was one of the most senior Shinto priests in Japan, and her mother came from a very old Shinto family. After graduating from the Kyoto Academy of Fine Arts (now Kyoto Fine Arts University), she went to the United States as a Fulbright scholar, spending a year at the Carnegie Institute of Art (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, where she received her MFA. Subsequently she was invited to study at the Royal College of Art in London; and travelled extensively in Europe and Asia before returning to Japan in 1963. In 1965 she returned to the United States as personal assistant to the late Prof. Fritz Eichenberg, a wood-engraving artist and historian of print-making. She also taught at the Pratt Graphic Center in New York and at the University of Rhode Island, before settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a free-lance artist. In 1972, following marriage to David Waterhouse, a professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto, she moved to Canada, where she has continued to be very active as an artist of single-sheet woodcuts, portfolios and illustrated books, a painter and a mural artist, working out of her studio in Oakville, Ontario. She has also written numerous essays, in both English and Japanese; lectured or taught at many universities and art schools; and travelled widely. In 1981 she was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

See:

• Frances Blakemore. Who's Who in Modern Japanese Prints (New York, Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1975), p. 101.
• Helen Merritt and Nanako Yamada. Guide to Modern Japanese Woodblock Prints: 1900-1975 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, c1992), p. 86.
• Mary and Norman Tolman. Collecting Modern Japanese Prints Then & Now (Rutland Vermont & Tokyo Japan: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1994), p. 232.