Some years ago I received an email from Hideto Kawabata, sent to The Woodstock School of Art, where I was working.  It contained a friendly introduction and some images of his paintings. I was intrigued by his work and I answered his message. We began a correspondence that has lasted for several years. 

I found that Hide was a successful Japanese business man who had developed a great passion for painting. I also learned that he was an ecologist who sensed the precarious relationship between modern industrial society and our mother earth, who sustains our activities. I think he wishes to influence this relationship in a positive way with his ideas and work. He possesses a measure of the healthy Zenoutlook that so pervades Japanese life and art.
The attempt to balance the opposites in nature and in ourselves with the unity of the whole. His work shows both sides of the mater. Positive growth energies exist along with the destructive force of unleashed power.
A modern alchemist, His paintings sometimes verge onself-immolation, by the raw energies he invokes.  The earliest works I saw were sun motifs, mandalas on fire. They were full of the force of our immediate father. You could describe them as hymns to that radiating orb.  Gold, black and yellow, spontaneous expressive strokes, gestural and flat, the paintings evoked energy in motion. They were decorative but never fussy or superficial.
Now his work and methods have changed a bit. More complex descriptions of these forces have emerged,expressed by the growth patterns of plants. This is the dance of vegetative life, a positive theme of growth and unfoldment that exists at the heart of Hide's paintings. A philosopher might call it aflirtation with the higher octave of experience, the creative unity of all things. I am honored that Hide has shared some of his ideas and allowed me to follow the growth of his work during this period. His I-magesare about the most basic forces in our world. He strikes the positive chord of brotherly activity. Activity that is good for the whole. How did this shaman evolve in Osaka ?


Staats Fasoldt 
http://www.ulster.net/~staats/index.html

Staats Fasoldt is Vice President of the WoodstockSchool of Art's Board of Directors and an active member of the Woodstock Artist's Association. He moved to Ulster County from Albany , with his wife Eileen in 1976 to attend the MFA program at Suny New Paltz andafter graduating in 1978, began teaching Watercolor Painting at the Woodstock School of Art. His popular Hudson River Painting Workshop's continues to attract artists to Woodstock each year. They climb the heights of majestic Katterskill Falls and tramp the fields of Olana in search of sublime views of the Valley.Staats' paintings are interpretations of nature that stress spontaneity as method.