About the Artist
As a boy growing up in the town of Hilo on the east side of Hawaii Island, his mother thought it best that Wilfred Y. Fujimoto take art lessons on Saturday mornings. “She had three rambunctious sons and needed something to keep us quiet,” he says. At his teacher’s direction, Fujimoto learned the craft side of oil painting through still life, fruits on a table, before graduating to landscapes. He would set up an easel on the porch and paint the scenery outside his teacher’s home.
Fujimoto moved away from art as his interests turned toward medicine. He would go on to have a distinguished career in endocrinology. He earned a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and received training in internal medicine from Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, the National Institutes of Health, and the University of Washington. Most notably, he led a team of investigators at the University of Washington that developed the Japanese American Community Diabetes Study, which demonstrated that Asian Americans were at increased risk for type 2 diabetes. In recognition of this research, Fujimoto has received several awards, including the Kelly West Award for Outstanding Achievement in Epidemiology from the American Diabetes Association (ADA). He has been a professional member of the ADA for over 50 years and has served on several committees, including the Board of Directors.
Painting, on and off, became a way of managing stress throughout his career, beginning again during medical school. “I still had my old easel, my old paints and brushes,” he says. “I pulled them out in my East Baltimore apartment and I started to paint.”
After serving as professor of internal medicine (endocrinology and metabolism) at the University of Washington in Seattle, Fujimoto retired in 2001 to the town of Kailua Kona, on the west side of the same island where he grew up. He paints in oil or acrylic in his downstairs workshop studio, often listening to music as he works. “Elvis Presley, fifties and sixties rock,” he says. “The old-time music. The music I grew up with. I paint and I listen.”
On the Cover: Juniper Bonsai
After retirement, Fujimoto became a visiting professor in 2002 at Jichi Medical University Saitama Medical Center in Omiya, Japan, about 20 miles north of Tokyo. “There is a bonsai village there, with several bonsai gardens and a bonsai museum, a half-hour walk from my apartment. I went there frequently,” he says.
Fujimoto was already familiar with the form, the Japanese art of growing and shaping miniature trees. He’d created a few himself during his time in Seattle, using local flora like pine and hemlock. He donated two of his bonsai to the ADA to be auctioned at a gala dinner in Seattle honoring Fujimoto when he retired. In Hawaii, he has crafted bonsai using bougainvillea, jade plants, and local tropical plants like Surinam cherry, strawberry guava, and ficus.
But it was in that bonsai village in Omiya that Fujimoto realized that this living art, delicate and beautiful, would be an ideal subject for painting.
Juniper Bonsai, an acrylic on canvas, is one of only two bonsai paintings Fujimoto has made thus far. It depicts a Chinese juniper in an informal, upright style, with the bark removed near the base to give it the appearance of aged driftwood.
This, the first of his bonsai paintings, hangs in his home. The other he gave to a friend.