Shigeki and Shihoko Fukumoto are dyeing artists — and husband and wife. They met while in university, traveled and grew together, and now in their fifties they are known for their innovations in dyeing techniques. These days they work on a quiet block of row houses in Kyoto ...

... but in separate studios. And in different styles. In fact, you don't have to look very far to discover that these artists and their work are as different as yang and yin, autumn and spring.

She, Shihoko, uses indigo dye on large pieces of fabric; he, Shigeki, uses various dyes, then cuts his fabrics into teeny tiny pieces and reassembles them into artistic creations. Her work is a modern version of ancient Japanese indigo dyeing; his work is a modern version of the intricate dyeing of silk kimono. Her art descends from folk tradition; his from high level silk dyeing tradition. She approaches her work with an open, expansive personality; he with the painstaking precision of an ascetic monk.

Perhaps the difference arose from their backgrounds. Like many, if not most, Japanese artists, Shigeki Fukumoto was born into an artistic family — of kimono-dyers — and he trained in generations-old techniques. Shihoko, on the other hand, had no family background in the arts.

But they met while university in the 1960s, studying fine arts and training as oil painters in the Western avant-garde style of the time. They married after university, and before starting a family they went on an overseas trip that unexpectedly became a voyage of creative discovery.

It was in New Guinea that Shihoko experienced a spiritual and aesthetic revelation. As she recalls, "I saw the craftspeople of New Guinea making things which were linked to their culture, their religion, the very way they lived their lives, and that made a huge impression on me. While they were making things that only people from New Guinea could make, I realized that I did not have the same kind of connection with my work — I was only imitating Western art. I began to see my oils, brushes and canvases as Western curios." On returning to Japan, Shihoko found herself "spiritually attracted by the depth and dimension of natural indigo," which, in Japan, dates from the Heian period (800-1180). Although she had no background in the art, she says, "It cast a marvelous spell over me."

Small wonder. While modern indigo dyeing, using chemical dyes, can be learned relatively quickly, dyeing with traditional, natural indigo is a complex process requiring long years of training and practice. The effort is worth it: the quality and lasting beauty of natural indigo are incomparable. Shihoko began a long period of study with traditional indigo-dyeing artists, learning the process start to finish. She even mastered the complicated stitching for shibori (tie-dyeing), which is traditionally done by specialists and not dyers. Thus she earned an artist's freedom to create, to transform her visions into reality. "Although indigo dyeing was a traditional medium," she says, "I found it to be an excellent way to create contemporary art." Today Shihoko is the freest of artistic spirits, constantly experimenting and coming up with new discoveries within the age-old chemistry of indigo dyeing. One example: while most dyers consider the natural foam floating on the top of indigo dye to be a waste product, she uses the foam to achieve an unusual shade of greenish brown.

Both Fukumotos work with high quality woven cotton from the Silk Road city of Turfan in far western China, but Shihoko also uses a variety of other materials: traditional fiber textiles, silk-covered washi paper, linen paper, gauzy hemp and woven pineapple leaf fiber. In one of her more exciting techniques, she alters orderly, loom-woven weaves by rearranging the fibers up and down with a brush while the dye is still wet, creating a delicately irregular texture.

Shihoko says that she innovates because "there are some tools which no longer exist and some new techniques and tools which are only now available. I couldn't be fully expressive if I didn't feel this freedom to explore and go beyond the traditional methods. And don't forget," she adds slyly, "all 'traditional' tools and techniques were inventions at one time."

Her creations include wall hangings, scrolls, costumes for noh theater and a three-dimensional tearoom that was just acquired by the American Craft Museum in New York. That spectacular installation consists of huge translucent ocean-colored panels of fabric on wooden frames; they shimmer like waves breaking in the sea, turning the interior of the room into a boundless space.

Although the notion to take up indigo dyeing came from a desire to connect with her native culture, Shihoko no longer works with the cultural connection in mind. Instead, she approaches her work with the freedom of a contemporary artist. "I want people to see my work as obviously Japanese," she says, "but with new, creative images rather than old, traditional ones. I think it is better to work directly with the indigo, letting my creativity manifest itself purely and straightforwardly."

Shigeki Fukumoto has a different personal style from his wife's: although on the surface he's soft-spoken and calm with quiet enthusiasm and almost child-like curiosity, his approach to his art is fiercer, with a spirit of unrelenting struggle.

It was out of duty that he returned to dye work. He was 26 years old when, after six years studying Western painting and his post-university trip with Shihoko, his father retired due to illness. Suddenly, Shigeki recalls, "I found myself back dyeing kimonos for the family's traditional business." He specialized in roketsu-zome, or wax-resist dyeing, similar to the techniques he learned as a youth; he also later embraced hiki-zome, in which dye is applied to cloth with a brush.

Shigeki was fortunate to have learned the craft young; it enabled him to jump right back in when he was needed. "If you faithfully study the established, traditional technique, you will have mastered it," he says.

"But," he continues, "you may also find yourself bound and restricted by it. The more perfected a traditional method is, the more powerfully it resists change." Shigeki worried that the return from high art to the family business might constrict him, limiting his personal expression. "If you want to paint pictures in freedom and comfort," he says, "there is nothing more thankless than dyeing." At the time, he rationalized that he could always return to oil painting as a fallback; yet luckily for us, he came to find that the "thankless dyeing process was of endless interest to me."

The difference between working with brilliant oils and "thankless" dyes is as elemental as the materials themselves. Oil paint stays where the artist puts it, but dye penetrates the entire cloth, and if it is not fixed it washes out when the cloth is rinsed. Dyes can change color during the drying process or blend with colors applied earlier. "In other words," Shigeki says, "dyeing requires a unique technical skill. It is inconvenient, tiresome and difficult, and if you make a mistake there is no erasing it or painting over it." Furthermore, he says, it can be physically demanding. "With the hiki-zome technique, the cloth is stretched horizontally and the work has to be done quickly and nimbly, in a bent posture. It is sweaty labor, but not a single drop of sweat must be allowed to fall on the cloth."

Despite the grueling process, Shigeki, like his wife, has expanded on ancient disciplines through constant invention and experimentation, "mastering the craft," he says, "but also changing its established technical traditions." Some of his innovations:

"Some of these experiments have been successful and some not," Shigeki says modestly, but what successes!

His works are pointillism for the 21st Century — fine, detailed, luscious explorations of color and light. Hangings, framed works and standing screens seem to glow from within like bioluminescent deep-sea fish or lichens in caverns. His pieces lead us to perceive light through the contrast between gradated highlighting and areas of color which take on added depth as we step back from them.

Although Shigeki's methods appear spontaneous, he is careful to point out that they are not random. Over the years, he has developed a sense of how the final work should appear, and he has learned how subtle modulations in color and texture add to the overall work.

Shigeki is an irresistible, human reminder of Yeats's poetic phrase, "the fascination of what is difficult." Rather than losing his personal expression, he has found something deeper than he could have imagined. The proof: he has not painted a single oil painting since leaving university.

For Shigeki Fukumoto, dyeing is a process of constant refinement, of subtle exploration and discovery, solitary work that he calls "at once methodical and experimental."

Shihoko Fukumoto, on the other hand, sees her work as an adventure, a quest for new visions and ways of realizing them, and a chance to work with other craftspeople. "There are many talented people here in Kyoto," she says, "and I really enjoy the collaboration."

There is one talented person with whom she does not collaborate creatively: her husband. Although the Fukumotos support each other's work, they have a "no touch" policy when it comes to each other's creative processes.

Yet together and individually, each has mastered one of Japan's most stringent and demanding media to cut loose, to soar freely in the boundless realm of their own personal visions. You can see the magic in just how effortless, how devoid of strain or artifice, their works are full of the colors and textures one sees on earth, in the sea, in the sky and in dreams.