OUTSIDE THE
Box
W
Catching the Wind For Japanese artist Yuri Tsuzuki, art is a natural meditation / by M. Linda Lee
40 TOWN / towncarolina.com
hen Yuri Tsuzuki was a little girl, her family divided their time between Japan and South Carolina. Each time she was uprooted, she sought comfort under a special tree in her yard. “I would always sit under the same tree,” she recalls, “whether here or in Japan.” Born in Toyko, Tsuzuki came to Greenville with her family in the 1960s. She celebrated her first birthday in the tree-shaded Cleveland Park house where the artist now lives with her husband, her seven-year-old son, and their three poodles. After college, the Princeton alum worked as a financial reporter for Good Morning Japan in New York City, but devoted every spare minute to art, beginning with sculpture and moving on to painting. “I am very out of the box in that I work in all media, whatever attracts me,” Tsuzuki notes. A sense of serenity emanates from her