Month: June 2015
Kewpie Culture and Alan Watts (Somehow these mesh in my mind.)
Kewpie Culture, charcoal and oil pastels on paper.
To interpret my individual culture, this was a bit of a challenge. This was the final assignment for a drawing class last year. Although my family heritage was mentioned to me as a child, it was not a major influence. My upbringing did not include much tradition from a specific culture. The biggest thing that molded me was the chaotic feminine energy I was surrounded by–my mother and grandmother and this dysfunctional triangular relationship. So instead of making my final drawing about that, I chose to draw something that makes me happy, something I want to look at, something other people might enjoy as well.
Kewpie dolls really turn me on. I discovered this sweet little doll in a consignment shop last year and immediately fell in love with her but the price was astounding, really…150 bucks! And her entire painted surface is completely chipping off. I visit her sometimes. Even though her price has been reduced, she still sits there, in a glass case, hidden behind some piece of hideous consignment furniture, hiding and waiting for me to come up with the cash–bail to spring her from the bondages of retail.
This drawing is of a kewpie doll on a fluffy, happy cloud floating over a cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood with various objects encircling her head. The drawing represents me transcending the mass-marketed, consumerist society that I previously thought I needed to conform to. I now intentionally influence myself with cultural items that I choose–art/painting, drawing, literature, Buddhism, the heart, music, and nature. I surround myself with a combination of cultural elements that bring me joy.
Buddhism, when revealed to me, made perfect sense. The messages have been packaged and repackaged in various ways over many years. My current favorite is Alan Watts. I know, he existed years ago, inspiring a turned-on hippy generation, but his relaxed attitude and simple down-to-earth delivery of ideas calms me, helps me make sense of things. I like to listen to Alan Watts recordings while I paint. On days that music with lyrics only adds to the swirl of ideas in my head, Watts helps me focus.
On Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows and My Shadows
What began as a hurried trudge through yet another reading assignment for last semester’s art history class turned into an enjoyable experience, an essay that embodies several of the ideas that shape my world. It was Junichiro Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows.
http://rum1.aarch.dk/uploads/media/tanizaki-in_praise_of_shadows_01.pdf
I enjoy Tanizaki’s poetic almost rambling style and the rich images he creates with words (perhaps that’s due in part to Seidensticker’s translation.) Many phrases struck me so significantly that I’m compelled to quote them. His ideas of inhabitation, full descriptions of traditional Japanese architecture, music, paper, pottery, and jade, etc. are worth consideration.
Tanizaki describes Japanese aesthetic preferences, the elegance of age, the glow of grime, the beauty of Japanese lacquerware with its “colors built up on countless layers of darkness” and silverware and metal with dark spoke patina, “the tarnish so patiently waited for,” and the traditional Japanese reverence for shadows and compares them to Western preferences such as the desire to drive out as many shadows as possible.
As a painter who has explored light and shadow for some time, I really appreciate Tanizaki’s explorations in shadows and darkness. His description “how the gold leaf of a sliding door or screen will pick up a distant glimmer from the garden, then suddenly send forth an ethereal glow, a faint golden light cast into the enveloping darkness” captures something I strive to show in my painting. His ideas that “we find beauty not in the thing itself but in the patterns of shadows, the light and the darkness, that one thing against another creates” and we “create a kind of beauty in the shadows we have made in out-of-the-way places” give words to the concepts I’ve been working with.
I identify with Tanizaki’s humble, Buddhist sensibility: “we Orientals tend to seek our satisfactions in whatever surroundings we happen to find ourselves, to content ourselves with things as they are; and so darkness causes us no discontent.” I also battle the “evils of excessive illumination” (how fluorescent light alters the beauty of things) and I lament the loss of trees for the sake of building more highways, retail locations etc. “To snatch away from us even the darkness beneath trees that stand deep in the forest is the most heartless of crimes” exemplifies how I feel about the unnecessary removal of so many trees I see around us.
Give it a read and let me know what you think!
Etchings
There is some magic that happens between the scratching of a design on a metal plate, submerging it in acid, watching tiny bubbles form…inking up the plate, painstakingly wiping the access ink off, placing plate and paper on pressbed, cranking it through the press, lifing up the blankets and paper to reveal a print. Pure magic.
These are some of my recent etchings.
Prints are for sale. Prices upon request.
paintingpoppy 