WILMINGTON — Mio Kawamura Reynolds was born in Tokyo, Japan, on October 10, 1938, the second daughter in a family with servants who referred to her as “Princess.” As a child (ages 4-7), she survived multiple fire-bombings during WWII, huddling with others in underground shelters.
She grew up a block from the Musashino Art Academy, one of Japan’s most esteemed art schools, where she modeled at a young age and learned how to paint persistently over many years.
Mio received her MA in Psychology from the International Christian University in Tokyo. She came to the United States as a translator for survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on a tour organized by the Religious Society of Friends. She then married Ted Reynolds and moved to the U.S. to pursue a Ph.D from the University of Michigan. Her 1976 dissertation was: “Motivational Effects of an Audience in the Content of Imaginative Thought.” While in Michigan, she created art for posters and buttons sold to benefit the peace movement.
Mio lectured at Antioch College in Silver Springs, Ohio, and Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., but with two children to support, she didn’t feel secure in her job after a series of one-year appointments. She said “au revoir to academia” and founded a research firm in Washington, D.C., consulting for multi-national companies and their American counterparts. This work allowed her to travel to cities around the world, where she always scheduled visits to museums, including the Louvre in Paris, The Van Gogh in Amsterdam, Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and others.
In 2006, Mio moved to Wilmington, N. C., in love with the “powerful skies and sunsets,” to shift her focus full-time to painting. Her influences came through the titles of her works: the poetry of Goethe or Browning, and the music of Bizet, Schubert, and Beethoven.
“Her figures are engaged in subtle but in-depth action,” wrote Justin Lacey about Mio’s work in The StarNews. “Each painting is stylized in a way reminiscent of stained glass, with separate colors sectioned off rather than blended together, and they come with all the positive light associated with that medium.”
Mio, whose name means “river village,” lived with a strong sense of purpose. She grew her own vegetables, replaced shingles on her roof, tailored her dresses, filed her taxes, and represented herself in court. As a business woman, she took on the habit of smoking cigarettes, she said, because she often found herself the only woman in meetings full of men who all smoked, so she saw it as a way of asserting herself among them.
She loved to cook baked salmon with dill and lemon, rice and vegetables. She drank black coffee and dry vodka martinis with olives or robust wines like California Cabernets.
In Wilmington, N.C., she became known for her sing-song way of introducing herself. Bowing, she would intone Giovanni Capurro’s lyric, “O sole Mio…” as a way of emphasizing she was not, in fact, “Mia” as was often assumed. Dr. Reynolds was often the last person to leave a party, many times after having led those who remained long enough in singing the Pete Seeger classic “We Shall Overcome.”
“I wanted to create something powerful,” Mio said about her work. “If you watch the power of love — parents sacrifice themselves for the sake of kids for the thing called love, unconditional love — and the moment you capture that strong unconditional love, it captures you. I want to share it with my paintings. If I can do that, I shall be very, very happy.”
She is survived by her two daughters (a medical doctor and a doctor of veterinary medicine) and six grandchildren.
