Hiroshi Tagami and Michael Powell have filled their journey as artists with creative altruism

Coaxing life from the soil, nurturing souls, the two have gone hand in hand for artist Hiroshi Tagami since his childhood growing up in Wahiawa, where he remembers tending to plants he'd find in his yard ... even if most of them were weeds. He cared for them with all the love one might feel for an ancient cycad or a prize-winning rose.

Art Exhibition Tagami and Powell will show original paintings with jewelry, ceramics and wood-turned bowls by guest artists. Place: La Pietra courtyard, 2933 Poni Moi Road Time: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday and next Sunday Admission: Free Call: 946-8520

"If I saw something interesting I'd just plant it in a can, soup can, tuna can. Once, my older brother and I got into a fight and the only way he could get back at me was to run outside to my plant stand, and he took it all into the road and dumped it all. Oh, that really hurt me."

So it was surprising when, eight years ago, Tagami sold the one-acre Kahaluu property he had shared with his business partner, ceramist Richard Hart, from 1960 until the latter's death in 1987.

The Hart, Tagami & Powell Gallery and Gardens was well known by artists and teachers as a haven of creativity, where instead of stern museum warnings, students were treated instead to signs near art objects with the invitation, "Please touch." Students were welcome to sit on the grass and exercise their creativity amid a backdrop of plants and wildlife, including, for a time in the late '60s and early '70s, baboons, marmosets, lemurs, squirrel monkeys, 300 birds -- from parrots and cockatoos to the Shama thrush -- and a lion cub that quickly outgrew the property.

"We'd help people to express themselves through drawing," Tagami said. "We'd ask them what is the sound of the wind chimes? What is the taste of blue? Children are very open to that sort of thing, whereas, if you ask an adult, 'What is the taste of blue?,' they'd just draw a blueberry!"

But Tagami was ready to fulfill a lifelong dream of living in Waimea, on the Big Island. Five years later, Tagami and his protégé Michael Powell moved to Kula, Maui.

"We were on an artistic voyage, and we let the islands move us around a bit," Powell said. "These were places we had talked about when I was 29, and I'm 50 now."

Now the artists are back on Oahu and have settled into a Waikiki condominium, where earth is restricted to a small patch in a common area. But it's enough. Tagami has been busily contributing cuttings from rare plants from his former Kahaluu property toward the creation of a serene oasis behind concrete walls.

While they were away, they continued to work with 30 charities in fund-raising through sales of art. Tagami and Powell's next art exhibition, Nov. 19 and 20, will benefit La Pietra School. In addition to paintings by the two artists, there will be wood-turned bowls by Scott Sullivan, glass sculpture and jewelry by Babs Miyano-Young, jewelry by Florence Miyano and Opal Fields, and ceramics by Kevin Omuro.

At La Pietra, the artists have also started a program that veers from traditional school traditions of rewarding the most popular, athletic or smartest students, and instead promotes a less bankable virtue by recognizing the student with the kindest heart.

"Several years ago my alma mater gave me an award for alumni achievement," Powell said. "It was after 9/11 and I think people were all thinking about the state of the world, and they knew about all the charities we were trying to help, and I think that's why they gave me the award, but I thought they shouldn't be giving it to alumni, but to students.

"One of the things that happened when I turned 50, is that it makes you pause and make new effort. Even if you are inclined to share, always, the importance of it becomes more crystallized and with the Kahe Au Award, to recognize someone for kindness, is significant. I think more of that should be recognized in the world."

THE QUESTION of how to raise caring individuals has become more pressing as the demands of modern life resulted in a "me first" mentality that permeates American society today.

For Tagami and Powell, giving comes easily when recalling their humble roots and past kindness toward them. For Powell, it's as easy as remembering those who supported and encouraged his early artistic endeavors, including his first client, writer Cobey Black.

"I came here when I was 24, working for a financial institution in Los Angeles that had branches here. I went back and forth for four years before getting a job with Bank of Hawaii."

He had met Tagami, whose works were collected by his father, at age 11 in New York, and they renewed their friendship here. Powell ended up buying so many paintings that Tagami took pity on him, saying, "I'll teach you how to paint so you don't have to buy so many paintings."

Three years later, Powell said, it turned into a career when 19 out of 21 of his paintings sold on the first day of his first art show.

"That's why I go to art shows and try to support younger artists. Everybody needs a little extra help in the beginning, and at the end."

At the time, Tagami told him, "That's the universe telling you this is the right thing and you should pursue this career.

"Hiroshi's really good about pausing and showing kindness to anybody who looks like they need a kind word."

Tagami had grown up as the sixth of 12 children of parents who worked for the military in Wahiawa. He was always interested in art, and by entering his sketchbook in a contest about hobbies, he won a camera and began taking pictures and tinting black-and-white photos for 14 studios. He opened Tommy's Photo Studio in Aiea at age 19, based on one of his teacher's English names for him. He was successful at wedding and portrait photography but had to close his business after being drafted into the Korean War at age 21.

All the while, 100 percent of his salary was sent to his mother to help her care for his brothers and sisters because his father had died.

"She was a special woman. Every night we would sit down at the dinner table and talk about our day so each child would tell what happened. It would always be somebody talked bad about us, or someone gave us a hard time, and my mom would say, 'OK kids, isn't it too bad they're not perfect like us.' In other words, you're not perfect, so show compassion because you don't know what the other person has been through."

The G.I. Bill offered him the opportunity to briefly study painting at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, and soon he was showing his paintings on the Honolulu Zoo Fence.

Eventually, he partnered with Hart and the two artists set up their Eden in Kahaluu, where Tagami also put his horticultural skills to work hybridizing anthuriums and raising rare plants he'd collected in travels through Africa and Southeast Asia. The anthurium Yoshino Tagami is named after his mother.

"If I was not a painter, I would be a horticulturist. It nourishes your soul when you work with soil.

"I'm working on fragrant anthuriums now. The other thing that's exciting is, hopefully, in my lifetime, to be able to produce a blue ti leaf. Not a dull blue, but a metallic, shiny blue. But it's hard, I still have purple ones only."