This may look like a busman’s holiday to you, but painter and printmaker Hitoshi Nakazato (GFA’66) is happy to be painting more, now that the semester has ended.

Nakazato, 66, a celebrated painter—he’s in lots of big museums, including the museums of modern art in New York and Tokyo, the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, and the National Gallery in Washington—has been teaching art at Penn since 1971. He is spending this summer in his New York studio, working on an ambitious series of 2002 paintings, begun in 2001 to celebrate his new U.S. citizenship and his age.

What began in 2001 with a goal of 2001 paintings has spilled into 2002, with the series name revised to “2002 in 2002.” He has more than 800 done.

So he’s got his work cut out for him, which may explain why he’s working on so many paintings at once.

The Japanese native has a show, open until May 23, in suburban Washington that includes some of the series.

We wondered if he liked all the paintings in his monumental series equally. But he said he doesn’t know which of the paintings are best. “When I like it, I may be using old criteria,” he said, noting how, in the history of modern art, some of the greatest works were reviled in many an artist’s lifetime.

— L.R.

Photo by Daniel R. Burke