Picture Farm’s Toddy Stewart has a particular affinity for other people’s creative process. Having helped to establish and curate Picture Farm Gallery, he has sought to make as many films as possible about the artists to whom we open our exhibition space.

Yuri Shimojo is a longtime Williamsburg resident, living for years only a block away from the Picture Farm Brooklyn space.

Yuri Shimojo was born 1966 in Tokyo. She is the last descendant of her samurai lineage. In her youth she practiced the Japanese traditional arts of the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and Kabuki and Noh theatrical dance performance. She lived and worked in NY and Hawaii between 1988 to 2014 and currently lives in Kyoto. – YuriShimojo.com

For the past three years she has made it her annual tradition to paint a mural of the matching Chinese astrological sign in our foyer.

In 2016, PF Gallery hosted a solo show of her work, a series of painting made in the traditional, or semi-traditional in Yuri’s case, Sumi & Shu technique.

Over the course of the days that it took to paint the year’s mural update and hang the show, Yuri and Toddy found time to shoot a little documentary about her thought process. The ten minute film,”Sumi & Shu : In Conversation with Yuri Shimojo,” shot in just a couple hours while Yuri worked in her journal with American inks, pulls insight from a two hour long conversation Toddy recorded. The transcript from the full interview would then fill out the catalogue that Yuri, Toddy and PF assistant producer Emily Lalande would design for the show.

The Picture Farm Gallery Mural

For three years, Yuri has painted a mural in the PF Brooklyn space foyer depicting her translation of the year’s Chinese Astrological sign. Year of the Horse, Ram and Monkey (so far.)

Toddy Stewart and Jamie Lansdowne have documented Yuri each time.

You can read the full interview transcript here.