Ikeda Lowe never exactly intended to become a successful artist. At the age of 21, she enrolled in a studio art class with celebrated abstract painter Emily Mason at Hunter College in New York City.  Mentored by Mason and her husband Wolf Kahn, whose vibrant landscapes inhabit permanent collections in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery, Ikeda discovered an unexpected passion for painting.
     “I always had a sketch book when I traveled,” she explained, “but I never thought of it as something I could do for a living.”
     Today, she excels at creating miniature and large-format watercolors embellished with signature accents of shimmering mica, making her a favorite artist at Chroma Gallery near City Market. Inspired by California’s Bay Area painters as well as artist Robert Rauschenberg, she crafts intimate, mystical landscapes that recall the graceful Zen spirit of 19th century Japanese woodblock prints and display a Mark Rothko-like gift for sensing the deep, emotional power of color.
     With their strong emphasis on saturated hues and linear geometry, Ikeda’s dazzling compositions grace the walls of Savannah’s historic mansions and ultra-modern lofts, looking equally at home in either environment.
     An interior designer’s dream, her watercolors complement virtually any style of home decor. Her work is popular among serious and casual collectors alike, both of whom tend to be attracted to the eye-catching palette, which ranges from cool turquoise to juicy tangerine.

Falling into Fashion
     Although her paintings feature the same rich jewel tones filling the pages of cutting-edge interior design magazines for fall, Ikeda insists that her liberal use of ruby, emerald and amethyst is entirely coincidental.
     “I don’t follow trends,” she said. “I’m inspired by shapes, patterns and colors. My paintings are like my life — they stop and start and are not incredibly detail-oriented.”
     Her abstracted landscapes, which are painted entirely from memory, evoke the gently sloping valleys of Vermont, where she studied art at the Vermont Studio Center, and the mountains of her native Japan, where she spent childhood summers visiting her mother’s family.
     “I like the shapes to stay pretty simple,” she explained. “It’s all about balance.”

East Meets West
     As part of that balancing act, Ikeda’s work seamlessly blends Eastern and Western aesthetics, reflecting her own dual heritage as the daughter of a Japanese mother and a Jewish-Russian father. “In that kind of situation, you can either feel completely lost at sea or you can decide to take bits and pieces to create your own island,” she said. “It’s the same philosophy in my paintings. I like the idea of taking from all different sources.”
     To create her meditative watercolor compositions, she starts by taping up the page into a well-marked and meticulously spaced geometric grid. She then prepares the paper with water, kicks on her favorite jazz tunes and starts dipping her paintbrush. 
     “You can’t really see the final picture while you’re working on it, but when you peel off the tape, there’s a real magic to it,” she enthused. “You never know exactly how it’s going to turn out.”
     Interestingly, she often turns her paintings upside down to see how they look when viewed from a completely different vantage point — a trick she learned at Hunter College nearly two decades ago.
     “When you turn the sky upside down and it becomes the ground,” she explained, “sometimes it works better that way.”

Precious Pigments
     Using a limited palette drawn from 15 bottles of discontinued Luma dry watercolor pigment, Ikeda allows her radiant watercolors to take on a life of their own, admitting that she’s always curious to see what form the inky blurs, blots and swirls will ultimately assume. 
     She doesn’t tend to strategize her color choices or map out a specific plan before she starts to paint. “I do them without thinking about it,” she confessed. “It’s sort of second nature.”
     Ikeda’s creative journey, and the path that led her to Savannah in 2000, has been a rather circuitous one. Born in Japan, Ikeda spent her early childhood in England before moving to New York City at the age of 5, eventually jetting off to Paris as a teenager. She currently lives in Ardsley Park with her husband, John, a professor of sequential art and the dean of communications at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Together this busy couple has four young children ranging in age from 7 to 3, making Ikeda’s prolific career all the more impressive.

“Stay at Home” Mom
     This talented artist paints at her home studio — a moss-green “shed” her husband built by hand as a labor of love — always listening to music or books on tape while she works.
     Over the years, her paintings have been featured on the set of “The Cosby Show,” where she also appeared as a guest actress, and in exhibits in New York, North Carolina and Georgia. Since moving to Savannah eight years ago, Ikeda has found endless inspiration in the Atlantic Ocean and in the infinite horizon line she glimpses from the beach on Tybee Island. 
     Although she prefers a more mountainous terrain, she admits that she has been captivated by Savannah’s lush, verdant beauty.
     “We thought we’d be here for two years, and that’s it,” she explained. “I didn’t even know where Savannah was when we first moved here. I had never thought about living in the South. But I really love it.”