All her life, Tetsuko of Cold Mountain has been an artist. Her roots as an artist come from her father and grandfather, both artists. It was from her father Arthur in particular that she gained her inspiration and love of art growing up.
During the 1950’s her formal training was at the High School of Music and Art in New York City. She trained there for four years focusing particularly on works of Abstract Expressionism. She completed the college preparatory program at her school and she won a scholarship to the Art Students League. But she temporarily halted her art career to attend the University of Chicago and pursue other interests.
For ten years she was involved political and academic work, but had to reconsider her lifestyle when she was placed in a wheelchair. After this Tetsuko returned to her love of art.
While living in Espanol, New Mexico she began working with batiks. Her unique style still shows her background from the Southwest. She received recognition for her work during 1976-1978 in Los Alamos New Mexico where she was featured in several shows. She left New Mexico and took new inspiration from the Rocky Mountains. When she came to Boulder Colorado in 1978 she left behind her former style and turned to water colors, oils, water color pencils, drawings, and eventually photography. In May of 1990 she again re-evaluated her art and its meaning she created a series of 18 oil paintings, moving away from representation to pure abstraction.
Her art is an attempt at the fusing of Oriental and Western styles, finding heavy Western influence in French Impressionism, and Eastern influence from her studies of Tibetan Buddhism with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. This is true of her name as well, which she legally adopted in 1995. Her Cold Mountain Studio has been around since 1971 when she became intrigued with the lives and stories of the Chinese monks Han Shan and Shih-Te, and took the name cold mountain from a poem of Han Shan’s. Tetsuko, or “Lady of Steel” in Japanese is based off of the character from James Clavell’s novel “Shogun”. In the novel Tetsuko was the name of a falcon hawk, an animal Tetsuko has always been associated with.
After over forty shows (ten of which have been one woman shows), she has come to call her work non pre-conceptual art. And the main quality of her abstraction is a dialogue between herself and the canvas. After over a half century of experience and personal exploration her art continues to grow and reflect her diverse past and her visionary scope of the world around her.