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Umera Lyota - Gallery Shimada - Kobe - Japan

2010-07-12T15:40:00.000-07:00

Currently, there is a interesting exhibition by Umera Lyota at Gallery Shimada. Umera's small paintings and specifically his portraits of two young women are well constructed images (see Shimada Gallery and picture is at bottom of page).

Around the corner of this portrait painting is a series of largish fine drawings by Umera where he exhibits his remembrances of creatures, places and beings, it's an honest exhibition at what fascinates him to use as motifs within his art .

The world is full of wonderment and Umera is not afraid to put his interests into paintings and drawings that in a way reminds one of the Dutch painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1525 - 1569) paintings with people doing all sorts of human activities in domesticated village scenery.

On the table within the main gallery is a series of Umera's books in opening them and turning the pages, well constructed images reveal themselves, but it also shows the he is on a small scale he is a good image maker but like all painters, who try large canvasses, the journey is fraught with aesthetic painterly challenges and artists from before Rubens till now still struggle with these concerns, no matter how famous the artist is seen to be.

For example, the relationship between brush marks and how to scale up from smaller paint traces is a difficult issue in painting and historically always has been, Umera in this show is now slowly but steadily working through these asethetic problems and in time his larger paintings may well become as successful as his smaller artworks.

So if your in Kobe do walk up the mountain to see this competant and interesting artists exhibition.

Link to Shimada Gallery

http://www.gallery-shimada.com/schedule/exhibition/uemura_1007.html#exhibition

Mario TAUCHI Solo Show　“Mario Mandala”　 Gallery Yamaki - Kobe - Japan

2010-05-24T16:23:00.000-07:00

Mario Tauchi Performance Drawing Gallery Yamaki

It was a strange performance by Mario for in front of him were two clowns doing an entirely separate act but afterwards in speaking to him he stated: ‘that it didn’t interfere with the artwork and he rather enjoyed it’ and so did I and by the looks of it so did the rest of the audience.

Mario’s work is about metaphysics and the phenomena of his spirituality and how it manifests itself as an artwork. It’s an open spirituality very unlike much of what is seen in the world today, that tends to construct rights of passage through ceremonies, with some of them producing a fanatical determinism that is either inclusive or totally excludes people and seem to be very little about love.

The intricacies of theology are not usually what concerns the artist. They're concerned with the big, beautiful fundamentals, and there I have never had any problem. In fact, anybody who has a narrow sense of their religion, whether they're Jew or Christian or Muslim or whatever, has only to look long and intelligently at the great work of another tradition and they will see what the religions have in common.

Sister Wendy Beckett Art critic/writer

The artworks on show by Mario are not about control but allow an open ended dialogue with anyone who chooses to engage them visually, one can construct whatever form of spirituality they want from of them. Although the drawings do resonate peace and serenity and they raise questions about what is metaphysical art, for the eastern and western traditions so strong within the societal memory. Mario's drawings are a nice respite from these expectations of metaphysical art for they resonate from his unique remembrances.

So if you want a break from the hustle and bustle of Kobe and you’re in Motomachi, take time out and go sit in Gallery Yamaki and enjoy the peaceful sensations that come from Mario’s drawings.

Kawamura Sachiyo - Butoh - Japan

2010-05-15T07:25:00.000-07:00

Kawamura Sachiyo - Butoh

Sachiyo's dance on you tube can be seen on this link:

http://www.youtube.com/user/commajp#p/a/u/0/tPNTKrZkNZM

Giving a good performance, giving it all is what it's all about. I love to perform.

Henry Rollins

Modern Rock artist

These YouTube videos by the Butoh dancer Kamanura Sachiyo contain a sort of raw direct sensation off her nervous system and in a way remind one of the British painter Walter Sickert and his Camden Town series of nudes where there appears to be a gritty, urban, sensuality resonating from the image.

So please click on the link and enjoy the videos.

Kumiko Okada - Shimada Galleries - Kobe - Japan

2010-05-02T04:21:00.000-07:00

Drawing by Kumiko Okada

But usually I begin things through a drawing, so a lot of things are worked out in the drawing. But even then, I still allow for and want to make changes

Roy Lichtenstein

This is an interesting show by Okada for inasmuch as it about a exhibition of drawing, the show in itself reveals one artists search for what drawing might exist as, with the motif being the human figure. Exhibitions solely featuring the human antimony are not all the frequent in Japan nowadays or even historically, there tends to be an avoidance of it, for what reason one has no idea.

For example; if one goes to Kyoto (one of Japans only cities left intact after the war) there is very little tradition of figurative public sculpture to be seen this is against what one sees of the sculptured human nude European cities. Yet, within the Japanese traditions of Ukiyo-e, the figure presents itself many times in extraordinarily powerful images from motifs as far reaching as bijin, shunga, bathing and war and strangely it seems these genres seemed to have some almost stopped.

Drawing by Kumiko Okada

But Okada conitinues the fine traditions of drawing the human figure and within this show brings into question what she has been visually experiencing in the way she renders the anatomy as a motif through a multiplicity of media. There is a range of gestural watercolours and pencils drawings but the two above artworks in the exhibition reveal a very sensitive inquiry into the public surfaces of the human anatomy.

The top drawing by Okada in a way reminds one of the French painter Paul Cezanne's efforts of rendering the human form (the English critic Roger Fry once called Cezanne's drawing in a review that of a hopeful monster due to the fact he thought he couldn’t draw, well Cezanne still gets major retrospectives and Fry's famous idea of significant form is not true), what is so likeable about her figure drawings is the she forensically searches out the form through time, this is not an new idea and yet it still seems to present some of the most interesting mark making in drawing and pleasurable to study within her drawn figuration efforts.

So if you’re in Saynommia do take a trip up the mountain to Shimada Galleries and enjoy this show.

Picasso at Akashi City Cultural Museum – Hyogo – Japan

2010-04-25T16:26:00.000-07:00

This is a great exhibition of Picasso’s best prints, it’s an outstanding show really and well patronised by the local people. But it is very easy to view each and every one of Picasso’s prints. The standout prints by Picasso within this show appear to be a period between 1904 – 1908, this was a time before his name became famous and his art turned into some sort of brand label, plus everything that seems to come with that and tends to brings the artist to a point of mediocrity within their artistic praxis.

Between 1904-1908 Picasso acquired a studio in the run down quarter in Montmartre, Paris called Bateau Lavior, it was cheap to run a studio, multi-ethnic and full of bohemian life, exactly the kind of cutting edge type of place an artist needs to exist in with their praxis.

Also within this particular period of Picasso’s praxis in Montmartre he and his fellow artists appeared to be fairly honest critic’s of each other artworks, and this was enhanced also be the fact the best paintings in the world at that time were hanging in the Louvre, plus close by in Galerie Durand- Ruel were the local artist of the day, including Pablo himself called the second Louvre because of the range of impressionist masters that were on sale there and which he always dropped in to see especially what Degas was painting this gave them a very good measure to what was good art and what was rubbish, unlike much that happens in art schools nowadays, were students put any old crap up and call it art and it is passed..

Within this bohemian multi cultural terrain of inner Paris, Picasso moved from rendering motifs about the dark recesses of Spanish religious painting to something more immediate, being the fringe circus entertainers that performed around Montmartre and who he befriended to get a personal insight into their vanishing culture, against the perceived modernism at the time.

Picasso’s prints on show around 1905 contain a sensitivity in observation about the human condition that is really wonderful to see, it like one can sense the now of poverty that seems to hang around Picasso’s drawn figures, like a dense weft of omnipresent misery, there is nothing romantic about this lifestyle, it is what it is a life in the arts, whether they be circus entertainers or fellow artists or friends.

There is something about these early prints by Picasso, maybe it is a sobriety and acuity of observation, uncluttered by fame and imbued with an immense desire to forge new motifs as a departure from his past Spanish subject matter. Nonetheless, whatever it is these images even by Picasso even though small, seem the most interesting within the show.

This is a fabulous exhibition and well worth of spending some considerable time viewing, plus Akashi is a really nice place to visit.

Sadaharu Horio Solo Show - Gallery Yamaki Fine Art - Kobe - Japan

2010-04-20T17:07:00.000-07:00

Steel sculpture by Sadaharu Horio

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

Robert Rauschenberg

Sadaharu Horio's life as an artist within Kobe/Japan in general has been one of an overwhelming critical contribution in expanding the societal memory as to what the fine arts might be seen and experienced as within that community.

Horio's Performance at Yamaki Gallery of Fine Art

What is so likeable about Horio's praxis and exhibitions/performances is that he tends to have maintained the counter culture that was so refreshing to experience in the happenings of the late sixties and early seventies, he appears not to have sold out like so many western artists for fame and money. In particular Horio reminds one of that idiosyncratic American artist Robert Rauschenberg or Dan Graham but he is particular to Kobe and therefore very different but equally as generous and illuminating about what art is.

And fame as an artist it seems is not Horio's radar, it may well come to him and he certainly deserves it, there is many things one could think of he deserves and one could be a full survey of his artworks and performances in Japan over the last three decades at the local major prefectural gallery, so the community could appreciate his efforts. But Horio's focus remains clearly on his praxis and it shows in this exhibition.

This current show by Horio continues his tradition of challenging the audience's ideas about art; it is far from the manicured formulated products the now seems necessary to make within many art schools around the world nowadays. If anything it appears Horio is the very person that art schools within this world may well need to employ as artists in residence, to deconstruct the product based outcome assessments that seem to be omni present nowadays.

Artworks by Sadaharu Horio

This is a very good exhibition and so refreshing to encounter, it enhances the meaning of critical artistic praxis, it is what art students should go to study and talk to the artist, ask questions to Horio and take what has been gleaned from the encounter back and use within their own idiosyncratic praxis. So if you’re in Motomachi do take time out to see this most interesting and exciting exhibition.

Haruna Sato - Cofuque Cafe - Kobe - Japan

2010-04-17T17:01:00.000-07:00

Water colour by Haruna Sato

It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Sato’s painting passion is the Japanese and more recently the English landscape (especially parks and the flowers within them) that she has encountered locally near Shukugawa and when staying with family in the United Kingdom. Not surprisingly, Sato is not alone in painting the landscapes of Britain for it there is a long and formidable tradition of artists who have passionately engaged it, ranging from John Constable, William Turner to more recent efforts by painters of like David Hockney.

Nor is Sato alone in painting flowers for the French Painter Claude Monet used them as motifs to study colour relationships, The Golden Age of Dutch painting is littered with the most exquisite images of painted flowers and as one sits here amongst the other patrons within this cafe in an old Showa period building on waterfront Kobe, partially surrounded by these flora water　colours by Sato's which resonate her painterly observations. and what is so likeable about the Sato's painterly efforts is her passion to try and capture the flowers in all their prismatic glory.

Sato's water colour painting praxis also consists of using photographic/computer generated imagery to partially arrange the structure of the motif and these are so well thought out before she attempts to paint between the permanent presence of a photo from the now and using memory through delay, and this appears to be logical thing to do, due to the fragility of the petals with their tendency to die quickly once picked and the needs of the artist to paint them.

And as the afternoon on this slightly warm spring day drifts on within this charming cafe, it becomes clear whatever the motif, Sato has a bright future as a painter, so if you’re in Kobe and in need of a relaxation, something to eat and drink and interesting paintings to look at then come to Cofuque Cafe and see this small but delicate show.

Link to Cafe & Map

http://www.cofuque-cafe.com/

Ancient Egypt In Torino - Kobe Musuem - Japan

2010-04-09T17:35:00.000-07:00

“History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illumines reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity.”

Marcus Tullis Cicero

Ancient Roman Lawyer, Writer, Scholar, Orator and Stateman

106 BC 43 BC

Museum exhibitions such as this one about ancient Egyptian artefacts are great wealth of visual information, not only for artists but the general population as a whole. The decorations on everyday utensils, clothing and fashion accessories are really wonderful to see.

The large sculptures of long ago important beings such as Anthropoid Coffin Lid of Ibi are inspiring because of the sophistication of craft, due to the designs with the object, the shapes and how the hieroglyphics all manifest themselves as a unified vision.

Other antiquities onshow that reflect a modernity which could easily be exhibited within any modern art gallery now is the Family group statue and another similar object Pair statue of two women, these two statues specifically remind one of Picasso’s painting of Women Running on the Beach c.1922

There is so many interesting objects within this Egyption exhibition ranging from tweezers, to rolls of cloth, ornamental jewellery and a boat to the afterlife and it’s a great luxury to examine these artworks plus vitally necessary for populations to expand their learning curves on the arts from long ago. As for artists it’s a wealth of visual information to move out from and create interesting artworks through the cross fertilizing of ancient and ideas in the now.

This is a very interesting show and well worth going to view, for exhibitions such as this one are not everyday occurrences ,so take advantage of it whilst you can at the Kobe Museum.

Gebisu Misato, Uozumi Junpei, Tokizawa Iku, Kunwata Tomoakio, Nishimura Nao, Sato Mie, Nishiumi Moe, Hashimoto Sayo, Maeda Natsuki, Nishiguchi, Serizawa Mitsue, Tamada Kanako, Katanimieko and Ohtski - Gallery Kitanozaka - Kobe - Japan

2010-03-28T05:15:00.000-07:00

Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Marcel Proust

In walking through Kobe and dropping in to see the odd gallery or two, it was kind of depressing to witness the detritus of capitalisms failures as evidenced by the many shops that are now closed. One wondered if this punishing recession is ever going to end but in spite of the societal economic woes, it was a great surprise to walk into Gallery Kitanozaka and see this energetic, idiosyncratic art show which what an absolute pleasure to experience!

The show was put on by Ebisu Misato, Uozumi Junpei, Tokizawa Iku, Kunwata Tomoakio, Nishimura Nao, Sato Mie, Nishiumi Moe, Hashimoto Sayo, Maeda Natsuki, Nishiguchi, Serizawa Mitsue, Tamada Kanako, Katanimieko and Ohtski. These afore mentioned students should be well pleased with their exhibiting efforts , plus those lecturers who have bought to them to this level of professionalism, for the ambience of show encouraged the audience to visually enquire forensically, this is good position to be in now. The hard part for young artist is to maintian this quality throughout their lives this is no easy task but a path they must try and travel.

It’s very hard to single out this work or that one in a student show or which is the most interesting for overall it is a visually pleasurable experience, laced youthful energy that resonated from the artworks. How refreshing to see young artists with such competence artworks on display, it appears give the audience great hope that the next generation is alive and well, taking up the mantle of research praxis within their art, delivered to them by the apriori histories of Japanese artists through the millenniums time and space.

As one moved through this show intermittently speaking in broken Japanese/English, it soon became one of those occasions that was going to be memorable and therefore bringing back those long ago memories (in my case) of student shows, and they are precious remembrances too, for they were places of departure into the unknown. And from one’s own experience they’re littered with highs and lows but for some reason as an artist one traverses fine arts high mountains and the lows in hidden grounds that dot the landscape across this vast terrains called art, I wish these young students all the best for the future.

Hiroko NAKAKITA - Gallery Yamaki Fine Art - Kobe - Japan

2010-03-22T06:58:00.000-07:00

Wednesday by Hiroko Nakakita

Currently on show at Yamaki Fine Art are the large and small paintings of Hiroko Nakakita with the smallish paintings revealing her maturing ability as a painter. Within this exhibition it appears that the larger painted images were very ambitious projects and one may well have wanted them to contained the same sort of very confident paint handling power as evidenced within the smallish images that resonated in the gallery, like the above painting titled; Wednesday

Big paintings are hard to do and they take an enormous amount of personal confidence to execute in any painting medium. Although there is within many artists lifetimes, small but sure steps taken to achieve successful large paintings and from of the sensations that resonate out from Nakakita's largish canvasses on show, it is obvious she is well along the way towards successful large image.

Color is crucial in painting, but it is very hard to talk about. There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that colour has with forms, and the statement you're trying to make.

Roy Lichtenstein

American painter

The smaller paintings on show here are really competently handled, they contain almost jewel like qualities that sparkle off the wall, brilliant risky colours, some sanded in places others contain thickly applied traces of oily paint in hot lipstick pinks lycra cerulean blues, light cadmium ochre sap greens with slight whitish paint marks delicately placed on top.　

Nakakita's Wednesday painting resonates the joys of life in the form of coloured marks, the idiosyncratic placement of these traces from memories, that are recalled through delay in the act of painting, along with remembered influences colliding from other moments in life, appear to contain the sweet and the sour of life’s happy moments. So if you’re in Motomachi - Kobe do go and see this interesting exhibition.

Huzisaki Takatoshi - Gallery Shimada – Kobe - Japan

2010-02-18T21:22:00.000-08:00

Huzisaki Takatoshi - Gallery Shimada – Kobe

It is nearly always interesting to see painting by Japanese artists like Huzisaki Takatashi and then bring these learned European painting influences for exhibition back to Japan, for the local audiences to visually experience.

In some ways Takatoshi's partial painting oeuvre reminds one of the dark religious painting style from seventeenth and eighteenth century, and imbued within some these images are people that seem almost completely godforsaken.

Certainly, some of the areas that Takatoshi has painted within Europe, the people appear to be in a desperate state, for he has forensically rendered these tell tale traits of lives lived on the edge of poverty well in oil paint and this brings a certain kind of gritty human realism of the poors plight within that bleak terrain, these images are not for your lounge room walls but they are certainly good paintings.

Takatoshi presents a world without comfort but not without the beauty of humanity and that someone, even though poor is important enough to paint, no matter what their social standing is in life. These people painted by Takatoshi are not the money grabbing artificial greedy uncaring bourgeois trying to get an artist to do an acceptable societal memory makeover, they appear from a side less seen by most who live within modern society.

Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.

Herbert Read

English Art Critic and Historian

In a way these paintings by Takatoshi contain a kind claustrophobia because one sort of visually swaths through the stench of poverty and in that respect the images contain a power that is hard to attain in painting and this is what is as intriguing about them as images.

There is one notable change in Takatoshi’s current painting, it’s on the right hand side of the gallery, just as one walks into it, the motif consists of a bottle on the table with some bread, it’s a simple still life, pedestrian one might call it but the way he has rendered the light, with its subsequent illumination achieved through competent brush marks, loaded with colour and is a real joy to visually experience. It is almost as if the painter is celebrating the colour of one’s existence no matter where they are in the now. And the range of transparent painted blues, purples slightly tinged with whites painted on the bottle are so interesting to examine.

This is a good show so if in Kobe take a trip up the mountain from JR Saynommia and enjoy the exhibition.

Chika Mukai - Atonement Video Installation - Gallery Ami - Kanoko - Osako - Japan

2010-02-11T17:24:00.000-08:00

Still image from Atonement by Chika Mukai

I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.

Mohandas Gandhi

Surprised is the word one would use to describe Mukai’s praxis sensibility with video, for she is young and a graduate student of Doshisha Women's College of Liberal Arts University, finishing her master’s degree (the only one this year). It appears Mukai was born with camera in her hand, for her previous video Sensation was a savvy fine art film, thematically based on vision (memory) from her gruesome visual encounters with western archetypal tortured sculptures of Christ on the Cross across Denmark whilst visiting relatives there.

For Mukai, the foreign visual sensation of the Western Christ hanging gruesomely, nailed to the cross and being told he died for us because of our sins was somewhat bewildering for her, even unfair, as her free choice seems to have be taken away, for it appears she would never have wanted anyone to die this way, for her actions in life.

Christ didn’t do anything when upon this earth but give the world options, he was negotiating, he was about choices and Mukai in her own way is doing the same, giving options to the audience, making them aware of her opinions, letting the world know that she wants a choice about whether God should die for her actions, in a way this video installation is her reconciliation with God..

Mukai’s current video installation titled; “the Atonement” at Gallery Ami - Kanoko is in the upstairs at exhibition area. Upon entering the installation, the light is subdued, almost chapel like and the video running on a loop, startis with a healthy bunch of flower adorning the cross, it resonates many memories from the histories of painting, like chiaroscuro and some of the floral still life images one has witnessed from the Golden Age of Dutch painting occasionally exhibited at the local Museums of Art in the Kansia region.

As the video progresses the flowers wilt and die, there are no miracles here and for Mukai that’s the natural cycle of life. Mukai’s video presents beautiful sensations of death even as the flowers wilt and die on the cross, it’s very strange imagery.

But for many people upon this earth, Christ’s journey came to its on unnatural end at the hands of tyrants, but that is not unlike how many people die in this world, everyday, there is nothing unusual about it, it is what it is a gruesomely normal cycle of death.

This is a very interesting an thought provoking artwork and Mukai video installation is on exhibition now at Gallery Kanoko, Osaka, Japan, Date: 8 - 13 February, 2010, 12:00 - 19:30 (last day -16:00), so if you have the time do try and make the effort to see it.

Link to her website here:

Links to Mukai and Gallery Kanoko.

http://www.mu-kai.com/chika/

http://www.ami-kanoko.com/

Hiroyo KOTANI Solo Show - Gallery Yamaki Fine Art - Kobe - Japan

2010-02-04T17:41:00.000-08:00

Drawing by Hiroyo KOTANI

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T.S. Eliot

In entering Gallery Yamaki there is a suit of small drawings on the far wall, hanging like precious jewels, it’s like a visual wonder world one has entered. It reminded one of a conversation had whilst at art school with an old Catholic nun, who said 'often she and her friend would walk in their convent garden and pick up a pea to look at the beautiful sensations that could be found within it, they would be quite amazed how God could construct so much beauty into a small pea'.

And in seeing Hiroyo Kotani suit of drawings then examining them one by one, the visual poetry that resonates from each of them saturates ones memory, as every small trace or mark is seen and reviewed along with ongoing sets of sensations.

In a world were speed is almost always seen as some kind of improvement in time management, this show is a pleasure to slow down and gaze at these small drawings, it’s a challenge really for the audience, for can they now really appreciate art, can they slow down and look a visual poetry, for these drawings are good and they certainly need that kind of slow forensic observation to be fully appreciated.

Artwork by Hiroyo KOTANI

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.

Thomas Moore

As one left the gallery, the speed of Japan jolted the senses back into its frenetic pace; the poetry of Kotani’s drawings were still with me in memory, the drawn nuances on paper with their small shifts of hue/tone, along with whimsical and more deterministic marks on paper appeared to collect into a visual symphony it was a nice remembrance to have had on the way home in these crowded trains.

So if your near Yamaki Gallery of Fine Art in Motomachi, Kobe, take time out and see this interesting show.

Chisato Tomokiyo - Sensyudo Art Residency - Wajima City - Japan

2010-01-28T23:25:00.000-08:00

Chisato

The young Japanese artist Chisato’s performance at the end of her Sensyudo Art Residency was stunning as it was performed in heavy blizzard conditions. Wajima in winter is no place for the faint hearted (but it is a extremely bueatiful and romantic place due to these elements of weather English Critic John Ruskin would have loved it) and in blizzard conditions with howling winds blowing down from Siberia across the Japan Sea, laden with heavy snow, this performance by Chisato was a physically punishing one, especially since her attire consists of bare feet, jeans, light undershirts with a white long sleeve shirt draped over her very thin body. Chisato is to be admired for her tenacity and endurance to complete the artwork in such inhuman conditions.

Chisato in from the snow

The beginning of the performance starts with Chisato walking down the street carrying a large Buri (fish) with a bag on her back towards the residency studios, her bare feet pushing into 5o cm deep snow, jeans now wet and already trembling from the severe cold as the winds whip up snow around her, (it’s a bleak scene, something out of a early Japanese film by Kurosawa Akira) the she walks into the building her exposed face, hands and feet are now red raw from the searing cold, its uncomfortable viewing, but very good performance and it does not matter if there is only myself and another residency artist Nobuhiro Kuzuya (who was photographically documenting Chisato artwork), this is good art for its in the now and the now is extreme weather.

Chrisato after coming in from the blizzard crosses the interior studio that contains the remnants of an earlier performance, out into the external Japanese garden which is under heavy snow and begins to gut the fish with her bare hands by pulling the head of it back, blood spurts out and smears into her wet white shirt.

Menacing eyes look in on the performance

The performance by Chisato takes on a strange menace and in other moments Christian ambience, for as she guts (with her trembling body/fingers) this large fish, juxtaposed her small body whilst standing on a rock in the Japanese garden and by chance one of those good art accidents happened, for whilst walking in the garden onto the rock she has pushed some snow down onto the uncovered part of it, giving it a pair of sinister eyes, it's like she is perched upon something evil, waiting, silently, patiently for its turn to create mayhem like this godforsaken blizzard now, against that into the sky there is a cruxiform constructed by two post crossing, like a metaphor as if this performance will be her last in these extreme elements.

Watching Chisato performance in extreme cold was nerve wracking, for she was violently shaking and still trying to gut this fish with her hands, and as they were weakening from prolonged exposure to the cold, she can barely move, minutes seem like hours, one wants her to quit but she is pushing herself to the extreme, it appears to becoming dangerous for her health and the blizzard is relentless.

Finally, the Buri was gutted, Chisato leaves it in the snow, gathers some up and stands in amongst the remnants of her previous performance holding the ice as long as she can above her head until she can no more, she then bent over, uncontrollably shivering, gathers a plastic blue sheet and walks blooded out into the blizzard to end it all.

The performance by Chisato witnessed by myself and one other artist and was one of best performances any audience could wish to see, executed in very extreme conditions and in a sense dangerous, so much so I wanted her to stop but she pushed on to her credit. It rekindled ones faith in the younger generation of artist that they will continue to push the boundaries out, to enhance what can be tolerated within the societal memory for the world to grow bigger aesthetically and more informed on what might be considered art..

Vale – Elizabeth Ford – Painter – Western Australia

2009-12-29T18:32:00.000-08:00

It was sad to hear the news that the Western Australian painter Elizabeth Ford had recently passed away. Ford was a nice person and one of Western Australia’s better painters who graduated in the nineteen seventies from the Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University) and later on did a post graduate painting studio at the Royal College of Art, London during her time as a lecturer at Edith Cowan University, then correctly retired early in nineteen ninety seven to pursue a full time and successful career as a painter.

During Ford’s career as an artist she exhibited nationally and internationally, plus is represented in many prominent art collections, whilst also collecting numerous art awards nationally and locally.

Ford’s sensibility in manipulating paint into an interested aesthetic was always a pleasure to visually engage, the colour, structure and texture of her artworks resonated the phenomena of happiness within the human spirit and the wonderment of visual remembrances from her sightings of unique and subtle nuances of light, contrasts, tones, colours and textures which surrounded her whilst on this earth and she painted them with forensic ability.

For example, on the Perth Galleries website link below there is a good example of Ford's painting sensibility, it’s about an artist’s memory of a dragon fly and how it triggers the phenomena of the remembrances of painting. Ford’s painting of the Dragon Fly is a great little image, full off the care free harmonies of life, where luminous cerulean/manganese light mid tone blues encompass the dragon fly, as it hovers within its encirclement of highly textured, kinetically charged textured chromatic grey brush marks, juxtaposed against a prussian blue, dark paynes grey background at the top, descending into more a subtle array of light chromatic greys.

In Fords later artworks, she used symbols from Aboriginal paintings, this is no surprise really for indigenous aesthetics are now well imbued into the Western Australian societal memory, and in some ways this is similar to what the French Impressionists did within their praxis, borrowing design ideas from Japanese artworks thus revealing how cultural cross visual fertilization is a kind of natural occurrence for artists, and Ford though her investigations has created some interesting imagery as evidenced in her painting Running Emus.

It is a shame Ford’s painting has never been given the prominence it deserves, through a full blown survey or retrospective at one of the major art institutions in Western Australia but if you wish to see her paintings there is a link below.

To all of Elizabeth’s family and friends condolences but her spirit lives on in her work for future generations to see and enjoy.

Dragon Fly Link

http://www.perthgalleries.com.au/artists/ford/fly.html

Running Emus link

http://www.perthgalleries.com.au/artists/ford/emus.htm

GUNYULGUP GALLERIES

http://www.gunyulgupgalleries.com.au/exhibitions/ford4/pages/preview.htm

Perth Galleries

http://www.perthgalleries.com.au/artists/ford.htm

Pippa Tandy - Photographs - Horikawa Gallery - Japan

2009-12-14T06:43:00.000-08:00

Pippa Tandy - Photographs - Horikawa Gallery - Japan

Seeing an Australian fine art photographer exhibiting in Japan, financed off their own back, reveals a lot about that original spirit that made Australia what it is today, before arts management became a refuge for failed artists parachuting out of art schools into cushy jobs to maintain their middle class life styles, whilst still trying to make themselves relevant artists from their office desks.

Tandy’s artworks on show in Japan have created a lot of interest from the local Japanese population, for they pierce the generalised idea of the Australian bush landscape made famous by the iconic pioneer Australian landscape painters Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts and Frederick McCubbin (now on show at the Art Gallery of Western Australia).

Tandy’s photographic images appear to contain a unique forensic quality, especially in the way she captures the nuances of the often overlooked Western Australia urban/country, that is often found within the decaying relics of human endeavours, such as an old building or a long ago abandoned farm house in the south west or a pipe rusting on the banks of a river.

Tandy`s photographs of salt lakes which seem to be being blasted by the searing summer heat, reveal nature`s own aesthetics in all its pristine menace. It is amazing in how alluring Tandy has made these. The hot cream salt hues appear from an old dead lake and it’s not often that something so lifeless can look so beautiful in death, but the way she achieves hope with imagery of death and beauty, tends to echo the resurrection in Christ and this is especially poignant in this God forsaken hot salt lake.

The town of Collie brings memories of just how far away and small Western Australia really is, especially the way the lone Toyota sign barks out a corporate logo in an isolated country town, so far from down town neon Tokyo, Nagoya or Osaka.

Looking at photographs of Western Australia from heavily industrialized Osaka/Kobe is so laden with irony because Tandy’s unique way of presenting her vision of that terrain makes interesting viewing and one might want to go there, but once there, it’s not so interesting at all. If only Western Australians could make that state as interestingly as Tandy’s photographs, then one might be tempted back, maybe, just for a little while.

Link to exhibition
http://pippatandy.com/

Young Painters - Shimada Su - Tanaka Shusuke - Matsui Satoko - Gallery Den - Osaka

2009-11-27T16:39:00.000-08:00

Gallery Den

On show at Gallery Den there is three fine young painters, it’s the type of exhibition which brings hope in the sense that there art is good and the prices very reasonable, so the everyday audience can afford an interesting image and these painters appear not to have been compromised by the downright commercialism that had bleed the integrity out of so much recent painting internationally.

So it was a relief to these see young painter’s ideas into paint traces, along with youthfull passion onshow. One thought that such exhibitions were yesterday’s news, that young painters wanted everything right now, money, big studio’s and fancy clothes. And as recently stated in this blog one can have all the superficial trappings like the British artist Damien Hirst but it tends blur the clarity of vision that is needed in early career painting or you end up like him now, which from his recent reviews given in major London newspapers is not good.

Tanaka Shusuke’s paintings reminded one of the English painter William Turner and his mountain motifs but with the influence of Japanese manga, especially his large greenish blackish painting, they’re intriguing images. The large painting by Shusuke of the mountain is ambitious and the paint qualities may well need in the future to focus on the density and weft of atmosphere and how to articulate in paint traces all the howl of the icy mountain winds as evidenced in the paintings of Turner.

In gazing around this exhibition another good issue reveals itself about these artists being they’ve appeared to use the history of western and eastern art well to free themselves and create their own idiosyncratic images, and in some ways they have adhered to the French artist Henri Matisse’s quote below, either knowingly or through sheer will in praxis to theory;

A young painter who cannot liberate himself from the influence of past generations is digging his own grave.

Henri Matisse

The paintings by Shimada Su resonates a kind of Japanese/American Pop culture, for there is an arrangement of images of animals, landscape and figures that tend at times to be charged with a painterly eroticism. From a western perspective the context of the painting is very dense in meaning and the images although small, contain a presence the belies there size and this is because of the artists ability to paint competently

Matsui Satoko’s shape paintings hold a kind of strange painterly attitude that depicts visual segmentations of human figuration which appears to give this whole exhibition a kind of visual edginess, this may well take the viewer out of their visual comfort zone and this is a good issue sensation to manifest itself from his images. So if in Osaka and have time, do go and see this exhibition, it is well worth it,

Link to Gallery Den: http://gallery-den.net/

Photography - "Naruki Oshima-Reflections" Nomart Contemporary Gallery - Osaka

2009-11-21T17:39:00.001-08:00

Sometimes but not often one can comes across fine art that contains artworks with almost jewel like qualities which are visually stunning and this exhibition of photographic artworks by Nuraki Oshima contains such images.

In entering the gallery and seeing Oshima’s photographs on glass or within (one is not quite sure of his system of praxis) was a visually stunning experience. Then to take time and look at the photographs forensically and see the differently applied layers of memory from the praxis of photographing various times from a singular motif, opened more sensations to the viewer.

Within some of the artworks within Oshima’s Reflections exhibition, the experience of looking at the phenomena of perspectives infinity (that one sees when looking into a mirror with another behind you slightly tilted) invites visual curiosity and the way these images hold ones attention, temporarily, through savvy construction of his photographic memories, reminds one of Marcel Proust’s statement; All our final decisions are made in a state of mind that is not going to last.

And in moving around the exhibition whilst visually analysing these photographs (large or small) one tries to anchor onto something within them, to make an aesthetic decisions about a particular issue of colour or form etc..., but all these aesthetics judgements tend to slip away, whilst forming new sensations (memories), with the newly discovered colours and shapes that each sighted sensation brings.

For instance, the sighted texture of a small brick, the colour of trees, and the multiple reflections within the windows, all these newly discovered sensations oscillate in and around old and new memories on the nervous system, nothing in Oshima’s work contains the traditional stillness of photography, they appear like illuminated jewels, continually shining new feelings.

Some of the Oshima’s smaller photographs are so aesthetic appealing and the way he has constructed the imagery on glass, protruding slightly off the wall, only enhances the quality of the artist’s work. It’s not often photographic exhibitions are this good, so if in Osaka and have time, please go to see this most intriguing show by Oshima, the gallery link is below;

Link to "Naruki Oshima-Reflections"

http://www2.nomart.co.jp/index.html

Kobe Biennale 2009 - Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art - Guest Artists Exhibition “LINK - Flexible Deviation”

2009-11-06T13:52:00.000-08:00

Enoki Chu

The unity and diversity of artworks exhibited with this exhibition by the following artists Yoshimi Okuda, Chu Enoki, Yukio Fujimoto, Etsuko Kasagi, Yasue Kodama, Yoshie Zenju, Yoshihiro Kishimoto, Shimabuku, Osamu Kokufu, Yukinori Yamamura, Takuma Uematsu and Tomoko Sawada makes very interesting viewing.

And just as one enters the main exhibition hall (which after viewing the show one must say they're really well curated) there is the installation of Uematsu Takuma with a strange array of mythical animals and in some way it appears loosely associated with the way the American artist Jeff Koons made use of animals within his artworks and Takuma exhibition also makes a bewildering spectacle to encounter juxtaposed the industrial waterfront scenery it faces.

As one advances into the next room there is an array of paintings Zenju Yoshie, Okuda Yoshimi and Kishimoto Yoshihiro and what becomes very obvious quickly is how influenced these painters are by various international painting trends, such as abstract expressionism and the ongoing painted traditions of European landscape. The painted images within this exhibition range space from the large and loud to small intimate studies of what appears to be tranquil bamboo forests that are serenely beautiful in some parts of Japan, especially the ones around Kyoto.

In another room further on exhibits Enoki Chu’s RPM 1200, this is a phantasmical city world of what one might call an outer-world metal experience, that appears to be inhabited by invisible beings, this is vastly different from his fierce looking intergalactic weapon that sits at the front entrance of the gallery. The excessiveness of Chu’s work really overwhelms ones sense and in walking around this floodlight city plus being able to walk in between installation and above it, gives the audience an encompassing and unique visual/physical engagement which is pleasurable.

Fujimoto Yukio’s Tower of time piece is equally visually overwhelming with its hundreds of small clocks ticking away all at the same time but registering different times, which brings one to the realisation that time doesn’t exist in the natural world, it’s a human constructed measure, and only memory provides some proof of one’s existence in artificially constructed human time.

This is a thought provoking exhibition and full of interesting ideas, so if you’re in Kobe try not to miss it. To see the artworks please click on the link.

Link to artworks

http://www.kobe-biennale.jp/kikaku/link/index.html#okuda

Terumi Shinryo - Gallery Horikawa - Kobe - Japan

2009-10-17T17:19:00.000-07:00

Painting by Terumi Shinryo

Terumi Shinryo is passionate about painting the nude with all its sensual and erotic hues that resonate in her memory and reveal themselves as paint traces on canvas.

The nude has a long history in western art dating back to Greek classical sculptures, through the renaissance till now but what is interesting about Japan and the nude, as public art, has it more or less only been since the Meiji Period, that the has nude been so publicly displayed. For example; in looking at pictures of European cities there appears to be the evidence of a long history of undraped figurative sculpture and painting. But here in Kyoto which was the only city not bombed in World War II, there for having its public art history still available to be seen, and which contains very little or no public undraped figurative art dating back to the Edo Period.

Paintings by Terumi Shinryo

There for it is up to artists like Shinryo, who observes the nude and represents it as a series of colour traces on the canvas, to forge and create a figurative painted history of the nude in modern Kobe. And one of the praxis issues that is so likeable about Shinryo’ paintings is the way she takes risks, especially in using what one might suggest are colours that are not actually represented on the body (motif) but somehow manifest themselves through the phenomena of memory, then exhibited through thought and action onto the canvas.

For example; on the above canvas there is a pinkish red figure which contains some subtle but heightened yellowish hues around the breast. The figure is surrounded by plum, greyish background and the hand on the right side is painted in garish salmon pink hues but this tends to make the painting visually balance.

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

Henri Matisse

The figure in art has long been an idea in painting that many artists have chosen to tackle as a motif, it’s a hard tradition to follow because many artists from the east and the western civilizations have done it so well. And here Shinryo continues that long hard figurative painting journey through giving her audiences this exhibition to contemplate the wonderment of the painted human form, this was a very enjoyable exhibition and one looks forward to her next series on the figure.

Louis Cane Solo Show - Yamaki Gallery Fine Art - Kobe Japan

2009-10-11T16:20:00.000-07:00

Peinture Abstraite

Artists are meant to be different and in being so create alternative visions of memory from mainstream television addicted society, as evidenced in the painting above by Louis Cane which is constructed on fly wire, using resin and oil paint. What is so seductive about the painting is how in some unusual way, it visually echoes the aesthetics of the Japanese Kimono through its use of spatial colour. Plus in walking around the painting and gazing at the colours caused by the coloured paint traces transparency that are placed on the fly wire and how the natural and gallery light shines through them, which tends to create an unusual style of kinetic painting into being.

Also in looking at these hues on and behind the painting by Cane it triggers memories of looking stained glass windows. Especially, how the outside sunlight penetrates through the churches stained glass windows into the womb of the church, which was Abbott Suger's intention (often thought to be the creator of Christian stained glass windows), being to recreate an example of the virgin birth of Christ, being the Immaculate Conception.

Canes extended use of the gallery walls to resonate the subtle hues of his artworks is a really interesting sensation to experience and the way the colours change as one walks around the painting, plus getting near and far from it, brings a kind of visual coloured symphony to the artworks, this type of radical enlightenment in painting is rare nowadays, especially with such a limited use of hues being transparent rose madder pinks, purple bluish greys, light purples and pinks.

Some experiences in art one might call a beautiful and there is images within this room which are certainly within this category. But the way Cane has achieved these aesthetic sensations within his painting is certainly a radical departure from the norm thus making his imagery all the more interesting to view, for one needs to really gaze and move around his painting to get the full prismatic experience that is available to the audience.

So if you’re in Motomachi Kobe make your way to Gallery Yamaki and enjoy this most interesting exhibition.

Preview of Collaborative Artworks - Nadiff - New Art Diffusion - Japan

2009-10-07T05:47:00.000-07:00

Currently, it appears in some parts of Japan there is some very savvy idiosyncratic artists quietly producing artworks which potently reflect the now in contemporary society, through using materials in the most subtle and interesting ways as evidenced in the strange imagery above.

The above image is part of series of photographs and videos that are about to be exhibited at the NADiff Gallery (see link for details) by Inagaki Tomoko and Takuma Uematsu. Also taking part within this artwork is Natsu Minami who is the artist holding the vacuum cleaner within the image.

In examining the above image of the bull which appears to represent the world’s sick economies or maybe reveal the dying bulls from the Wall Street Stock exchange, nowadays appear a shadow of their former selves. And within this particular image, the way the setting sun dapples upon the bulls decaying carcass, tends to signify that soon, all rays of hope in the way of some kind of economic recovery, will vanish as night takes over the day and what tomorrow brings will surely be less than today.

The head of the bull in the above image still looks strong but its stock market swagger and arrogance has all but disappeared, it knows it’s failed, for the Japanese woman is now on its back, vacuuming its once mighty flesh, she has no fear of riding the bull whilst nonchalantly vacuuming, it’s a clear sign of the beast’s impotence. It’s a potent image, that a demure Japanese woman only armed with a vacuum cleaner, now stands oblivious to her own power over a subdued animal.

The image is laced with irony that the everyday household chore of vacuuming, which companies once advertised glamorous women happily holding these household appliances, like a signifier of successful woman hood was now turned on the capitalist beast itself. What is so unusual about this image is neither beast, nor the woman show any emotion to the obvious outcome, being the final disappearance of the stock market bull, once it is sucked up by its own invention.

Also within this image and standing far more victorious than the bulls horns is the trucks of the trees behind the decaying beast, it is as if nature is almost declaring victory over rampant consumerism, the sources of its destruction through its unrelenting carbon output and wanton degradation of its natural resources for which it knew of no restraint.

It is almost like nature is no longer subjugated to consumerism, there appears to be a return to Eden happening to the world, for the capitalist bubble has burst, the earth may well breathe easier for the moment and change its ways. This is a very interesting exhibition and well worth of a visit.

NADiff

http://www.nadiff.com/news/ineoueruhito_gallery.html

NADiff home

http://www.nadiff.com/home.html

Bridges in Osaka, Kobe and Awaji - Japan

2009-10-02T17:38:00.000-07:00

Japan has an impressive history of building bridges; this historically is mainly due because of the many rivers that run down from the mountains and the need for people to cross from one prefecture to another. Nowadays its seems bridge building is to bypass the urban centers/developments and create links to the many islands that exist in the terrain being natural and unnatural (for example; man made islands for airports, high rise apartments and industrial parks).

The highway from Kansai Airport to Kobe is littered with an impressive array of bridges and at times it feels very majestic to drive along, one can only think what the eighteenth century British painter John Martin may have made of such imagery because it is really stunning scenery at times.

Some of the bridges bring a sense of the motorized sublime to the fore, it’s like driving through the clouds to heaven, and it’s a very weird feeling especially if one comes from a flat terrain like Australia. The bridge below is just stunning and immensely long, to be exact it is 1991 meters long almost two kilometers, its correct name is The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge or known in Japan as the Pearl Bridge, its 710 kilometers long than The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco which tends to give one a sense of scale for it is also the longest Suspension Bridge in the world. Despite all its records it is still one majestic bridge and worthy of a visit to see.

Tokyo Photo 2009

2009-09-06T01:05:00.000-07:00

Tokyo Photo 2009 in as much as it was interesting didn’t tend to overwhelm one senses even though within it there is some excellent exhibits. One hopes that in visiting many of these big art events there is a certain significant visual punch to the memory to be had and that shakes the audience out of visual compliancy or the acceptance of just glancing at a photograph or painting.

At Tokyo Photo 2009 for example, many of the photographs remained within a comfortable certain format, easy on the eye with very little of large format images to be seen, let’s say over 2m x 2m. The other issue is content of imagery that one might find hard to hang on house wall, like the poor of Japan sleeping in cardboard boxes that one sees consistently around Japan nowadays with all the cities grime attached to their being, it was like the smell of humanity was sterilized out of the exhibition except for a few pockets of critical fine art resistance.

Gallery Sho (there were others but for arguments sake I have used them) is a kind of signifier in a way as to what critical fine art photography may well presents itself to an audience, against the lack of imagery that wasn’t taxing or pulling at ones senses. For example, at Gallery Sho there was series in your face nude erotic women by Helmut Newton, Guido Argentini and David Stetson followed by a strange series of what might call a series of sinister events, not quite definable or revealing to the viewer but one understood clearly that what was taking place here wasn’t good. These were images that taxed the viewer on several issues of censorship and morality.

There were some memorable images though as evidenced in Yuhki Touyama’s photograph titled; 2009 of a forlorn or abandoned figure sitting on a bed naked but not resting, just there, lost in the misery of the moment in a darkened room, the air of the image is dense with melancholy and sadness. It’s about as near as sensing someone’s misery in photography as one gets.

Also on show with Tokyo Photo 2009 is Photo American Tokyo 2009 and the best of these were the ethnographic photographs from early in the nineteenth century, as evidenced by Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph titled: Katherine being of a young girl with a frozen gaze back at the camera in the now from a centuries old moment long ago which makes a timeless haunting photograph.

Also there is Edward Sheriff Curtis portrait photographs of American Indians at the turn of last century, these tend to make the audience of inquire into culture lost and raises the questions as to why these cultural catastrophes still happen.

Tokyo Photo 2009 is an interesting snapshot as to what is happening now but raises questions about contemporary photography and is it really presenting itself as critically as the media has throughout its own formidable history so if you’re in Tokyo do try to make it this show.

Tokyo Photo link

http://tokyophoto.org/

Link to Gallery Sho

http://tokyophoto.org/en/exhibitor_galerieshocontemporaryart.html#5

Link to Yuhki Touyama

http://gptokyo.jp/

Yoshiki Hase - The Happiness Within - Housing Works - New York - Gallery Yamaki - Kobe - Japan

2009-08-15T03:41:00.000-07:00

Yoshiki Hase Explaining Photographs

About a decade ago whilst doing my masters and sitting in the former Professors home office, there was a Goya print above his desk, it was the kind of art that one didn't see in middle class suburbs within the surrounding neighbourhood. The man in Goya's print was detached looking, devoid of emotion to the moment but living in the moment devoid of humanity that might touch him and make his life bearable in his omni present abject state of madness. Goya had the forensic insight to portray humanity or its lack of with grim hard reality that few artists have ever surpassed him.

Yoshiki Hase has photographically bitten hard into the detritus of humanity, mainly black, mentally and socially disabled Americans many with HIV complications that New Yorkers seem to have rejected in run down estates, this not were the so called pretty people live or corrupt bankers who think they can rip of millions, if they make millions.

This is poor black America but strangely and mostly through the collaboration of artist and motif (black Americans) it's one of the most poetic series of images one could hope to see. The flesh of some of these black Americans has life's harshly lived, drug ridden journeys etched into the skin, their like interesting books, whose covers can be read and listen too and learned from, not discarded by the rich societal memories, whose hypocritical self interested and God faring ways, keep these people hidden from mainstream American and the world.

Life is not about perfection, middle class clean living with big houses/cars, its more than likely about the idiosyncratic smiles that deck ones face when human warmth touches another person, no matter how rich or poor people are in this world.

(there is a better shot in the Yoshiki's link below)

The more one learns about America, the more one realises that the rich need some very real education on how to share wealth. One day in listening to a Noble prize winning medical scientist he stated; that one could live well for twenty years with HIV nowadays with the drugs that are available now. And sharing the health wealth of American is the hottest issue facing President Obama now, the need to do something is of vital importance to these people, it is what President Clinton/Bush failed to do. It appears imperative for America's health industry to share its knowledge and drugs, so the people within these images can have some sort of hope for the future. Why a country like the United States that spends billions on weapons to keep itself free from invasion or terrorist threats but apparently cannot defend its people medically, as some of these images stand testament too, seems to lack the ideals it aspouses too.

For example, within the above photograph there is a black American standing for Yoshiki in what one might suggest his best attire, near a well used building with grimy whitish walls, solemnly but with dignity looking upwards in memory of his two departed wives , life has no doubt has been hard for him, he understands that the America dream has departed that country long ago, its now survival and more nightmarish as every day goes by for nightmare is on the wall in the upper right hand corner subtly within the photograph, being a CCTV camera, which tends to represent America at its most paranoid, about its own disabled citizens and this even surpasses Orwellian standards or Ballards, this appears about as bleak and distrustful as a state can get on its own sick people.

It's a credit to Yoshiki that within these harsh environs, he has forensically managed to capture the dignity of these black Americans and to remind us to look beyond the public surfaces of humans and discover the beauty of their thoughts and smiles as this show reveals.

This is a great show by Yoshiki, it deserves to be an internationally travelling exhibit because these people are your neighbours, no matter where one lives on this planet, so if your in Motomatchi, Kobe please go to this most interesting exhibit at Gallery Yamaki.

Yoshiki link

http://www.yoshikihase.com/the%20happiness%20within/index.html

Sachi Yoshimaka Mono Prints - Gallery Shimada - Kobe - Japan

2009-08-08T00:03:00.000-07:00

Mono Print by Sachi Yoshimaka

This an interesting show for it about fine art, not about production of art or industry backed art, it at the critical edge where an artist expresses her ideas/sensations in print. Sachi Yoshimaka takes risks, she is not afraid to put down in print the most honest memories (sensations) as they reveal themselves and as it happens during the praxis of printmaking.

It's also a credit to Shimada Gallery to exhibit such artist's integrity for these are the prints that are not of pleasant landscape but raw and as much as can be unadulterated sensations, therefore as close to fine art as one can go.

Mono Prints by Sachi Yoshimaka

Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. You are here to realize your inner divinity and manifest your innate enlightenment.

Morihei Ueshiba

Aikido Master

In someways the prints by Sachi Yoshimaka reminds one of the traditions in sumi-e, where raw direct sensations of marking making are placed onto the surface of the paper and through ones life span, these traces develop into a store house of memory for the artists, so as their visual paradigm expands through the natural phenomena of ones existence, they can be recalled upon and enhanced with new memories of human experience.

These prints on show now by Yoshimaka are starting exhibit the poetry from her visual experiences up to now and they're resonating a very idiosyncratic visual memory. And what is so like able about them is they challenge the viewer as to what a print might be, for they appear not for some coffee table fashion gloss magazine but reworked memories as mono print and very interesting for the squeezed fat, thin, pushed layered marks along with the full, half tones liminal charcoal nuances of hues.

No doubt as Yoshimaka praxis journey develops the poetry she is discovery within her remembrances will make further interesting viewing as these do, so if you are in Kobe please go to Gallery Shimada and enjoy the show.

Matsui Kensaku - Gallery KAi - Kobe - Japan

2009-08-01T06:19:00.000-07:00

Drawing by Matsui Kensaku

Matsue Kensaku's drawing are on slantwise paper, as evidenced in bottom image, the top and middle drawings are closeups. The tension these drawings create for the viewer is interesting because in someways, it appears to reflect a kind of societal memory that is happening now in the world, meaning that as much as the water is contained within the structure of the transparent glass for all to see, there is this underlying sensation that is could easily just spill out like an economy spiralling out control.

Kensaku's drawings of ceramic, glass and water still life seemingly on the edge, reminds one of E. H. Grombrich's phrase;

Neither art nor nature is ever as smooth and cold as glass. Nature reflected in art always reflects the artist's the own mind his predilections, his enjoyments and therefore his moods.

Drawing by Matsui Kensaku

But within these pencil drawings by Kensaku reflecting manufactured nature, the aesthetics of small vessels that hold the human supplies of energy being food and water, there is a troubling sensation when gazing at these household objects and it appears they lack any emotion of human joy, they're bleak, meticulous, calculated, cooly but passionately executed.

These still life by Kensaku appear like a signifier for an oblique future, given to us by political law makers in the interest of public safety, which really means in western terms, to look after there friends who sponsored them to power. And that is what is so good about this show, for it reveals an artist, exposing, through very humble manufactured goods, the slantwise (oblique) dialogue friends, politicians and just about everyone in the world has with you, at one time or another.

Also Kensaku's artworks are all the more stronger for his usage of personal household objects to convey these ideas, for his drawings are rendered with a sense of surety and intimate knowledge, not unlike the Italian painter Morandi.

But unlike Morandi, Ketsaku has also use himself as a motif with the manufatured still life as evidence in the last image, these appear not as strong as the focused still life drawings, mainly because his command of rendering the human form is to the same level as his keeningly obeserved still life.

Nonetheless this is an interesting show and well worth a look, so if your in Motomachi, Kobe try and make to the KAI Gallery.

Veronika Dobers - Golden Bundles and Blue Heaps - Gallery Yamaka Fine Art - Kobe - Japan

2009-07-18T16:37:00.000-07:00

Creating interesting art is never easy, that's for sure and how it is perceived by an audience is uncontrollable, no matter how much the artist desires this through labels attached to an art piece, for people's remembrances will bring all sorts of sensations to the fore, once a work has been sighted and travelling along the nervous system. That is the nature of delay and influence in memory.

Verinoka Dobers artworks contain many variants of memory once the audience has sighted it, for her paintings bravely use cross cultural references and that is always going to be challenge for the devotees and within her own praxis to theory. One of the most interesting artworks within this show by Dobers is titled; Blue Heap through its use of western aesthetics in painting and Japanese calligraphy. It's a risky artwork by Dobers through her use of text in art, especially Japanese, for the history of calligraphy is very long and contains powerful signifiers for audience.

This attempt by Dobers in Blue Heap to turn Japanese text into art with its use of western aesthetics in painting, is interesting which is to be commended. But within this particular image there is resonating within memory the power of meaning within the Japanese calligraphy because of its formidable history of communication. Therefore making one wonder what the calligraphy conveys in its relationship to the western painted image. Dobers attempt to deconstruct Japanese calligraphy into a hybrid western art piece is a very difficult ask of herself but no journey in praxis is worthy without such challenges, along with its subsequent successful and those not so successful paintings in conveying the intentionality's of the aritst's praxis to theory, as evidenced by some of the works within this show. But as the Japanese master artist Katasushika Hokusai once commented on his praxis about his oeuvre; he was over seventy before he did anything worth while.

Dobers is not alone in these attempts to resignify art and text, as evidenced here in David Bromfield book CODES The art of Janis Nedla 1982 -2007:

Nedela's early treatment of the book have much in common with Mallarme's though he must have learnt of them second hand, since he was not aware of Mallarme's work. The French poet's vision became central to a particular modernist perspective. His sense of plasticity of the form of the codex, a series of two sided leaves bound together, and of type as a landscape of forms rather than sounds or grammatical patters, made the greatest impression. In the later twentieth century Derrida and other French philosophers took up the idea that written language was far more important than the inherent plasticity of of the book itself.

Art and text will continue to pushed outwards, passed nebulous boundaries and crossing over junctions to be blurred, blended, manipulated but always its seems by artists to provoke ideas that will make audiences ponder the meanings resonating from such artworks and Dobers show is interesting viewing, so if your in Motomachi please take time out and enjoy the exhibition.

The Louvre Museum Exhibition: Master Paintings of 17th Century Europe

2009-07-04T16:40:00.000-07:00

Joannes Vermeer The Lacemaker (c. 1669 -70)

The quality and quantity of amazing artworks within this exhibition is stunning and the Japanese public were out in force to view it, for the treasures of the Louvre were on show from Rembrandt's Self-Portrait to Poussin's The finding of Moses and Franz Hals Le Bouffon au Luth.

Immediately upon entering this exhibition one issue starts nagging and that is how fresh and modern these paint traces are in the afore mentioned artists paintings appear. Not only do they appear fresh traces by Vermeer and co they also have been intelligently placed upon the canvas.

In travelling around Japan and looking at the many contemporary art exhibitions, one of the questions raised by this Louvre exhibition is are modern artists like Gerhard Richter, really that innovative in laying down paint traces, compared to someone Franz Hals who was painting nearly four centuries before hand or is Richter even a post modern painter (whatever that is)? So what if Richter used photographs, so did Degas, with equally stunning effect in painting creating images and even more so in some ways.

Also why do these images by Vermeer and company contain paint traces that continue to resonate such powerful sensations, tending to outstrip any modern day photography or film? For instance, the quality of light in Vermeer's The Lacemaker appears as strong now in radiating sensations as the day he painted it. Does one look at Star Wars and still go WOW! One doesn't think so. Therefore the issue of how paint traces contain such sensational energy that carries through time and space, without an electrical energy source is real phenomena, is it the chemical sensation of the pigmentation or the way the artist has laid the oil traces onto the canvas?

One suspects several aspects of the afore mentioned criteria but essentially it appears to have one common denominator and that is the intelligence of the artist and their manipulation of oil paint in praxis towards the end common standpoint of a given painting, and does this show within this exhibition.

For all the nonsense (apart from some good ones) that art and ideas tends to throw at the audiences (spectators of art are intelligent and sadly it appears those who are in charge of exhibiting culture appear not to have understood this yet, that's why many galleries stand empty) that is on show within the many contemporary art galleries, it is amazing to see these centuries old painted concepts continually surpassing the present day artworks in their observed painting sensibility .

The late British art critic Peter Fuller understood these sensations resonating from master artworks but falsely labeled them as Theoria a higher aesthetic, unfortunately for him it appears there is only aesthetics, it's either interesting or it's not and one does not think painted aesthetics can be labelled in any other way. Therefore such interesting aesthetics as experienced within these artworks from the Louvre are hard to surpass because so few people on this earth can go that distance in painting sensibility, its just way to difficult.

So if your in Kyoto and want to see some of the best images painted centuries ago and now take a trip to the Louvre show it's stunning.

Mari Kouno - Paintings - Shimada Galleries - Kobe - Japan

2009-06-24T16:56:00.000-07:00

Painting by Mari Kouno

Mari Kouno’s paintings are about the phenomena of aesthetic desire and how it constructs itself through artistic praxis as an image as evidenced within her paintings for they resemble visual poetry in paint, encompassing many sensations that are pleasurable, seductive and littered with wonderful reworked memories. For example, within Kouno's acrylic traces one can witness the influence other artist's visions (memories) such as the American artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, along with the very strange phantasma imagery of the Japanese artist Arimoto Toshio.

Painting by Mari Kouno

One works without thinking how to work.

Jasper Johns - American Artist

A painters influences throughout their lives will always being ongoing, that is the nature of memory, for in some way small charges of remembrances of what has been optically experienced as an artwork will always integrate with the now in memory, and then into praxis for reworking into one’s idiosyncratic aesthetic desires in painting, thus often creating interesting images as evidenced by these paintings by Kouno, as they to will now time-travel through space, so other artists will learn and glean knowledge from within their own praxis as she has successfully achieved within this show.

The other issue that so likable about Kouno’s paintings is some of them present a visual challenge as to what painting might be. For instance, some of the mark makings in acrylic paint traces by Kouno resembles a kind of kinetic visual experience through frenzied applications, whilst cohesively presenting itself as an image.

But aesthetic taste is personal and not collective and these two images on this page are ones favourites, for within this exhibition by Kouno they resonate the successful influence of the integrated histories of western painting and sublimely beautiful traditions of Japanese sumi-e painting, as evidenced by the loaded brushes of hue that are subtly place with confidence on canvas, along with the sensitively applied drifts of brushwork across the picture plane driven by aesthetic remembrances, whilst other traces contain kinetic memories that resonate an optical sensitivity thus creating a wonderful sensation.

Kouno's images represent intelligent aesthetic pleasures in painting, loaded with passion and desire, and applied with its full spectrum of paint traces, presenting the audience with a visually rewarding exhibition, so if your in Kobe take time out to see this most interesting show.

Twinism AD & A Gallery - Osaka - Japan

2009-06-14T19:05:00.000-07:00

Yodogawa Technique

The exhibition Twinism is a celebratory show of twenty years about the exchange exhibitions that have taken place between Osaka and Hamburg and the feeling resonating from this exhibition is that the cutting edge of fine art has not blunted but sharpened through these visual dialogues which is refreshing to experience first hand.

Yodogawa Technique

For example; Yodogawa Technique is a cleverly made scooterized fish sculpture which appears simple in structure and constructed from the human detritus of consumption being shoes, tires, bags BMW logo's for fish eyes which was dumped in the Osaka river system. The sculpture itself looks menacing, like some sci fi fish created from the murky polluted depths of the Osaka river system, that appears to have turned into some hybrid manga monster, created through some terrible science project gone awry, making visual and physical engagement of the artwork all the more interesting, it's good art and fun too.

Tomoko Ingaki very interesting video artwork seems to origiante partially from the long history of image making that is associated with the cherry blossom tree, especially its relationship with the Samuri through having a short beautiful life. In Ingaki's video there is a person getting their face slapped in front of an aesthetically pleasing cherry blossom tree in full bloom, this location helps to seduce the audience to be complicit in watching pleasure and pain. It is interesting to see the audience viewing Ingaki's looped video because if one looks at an image of violence, then in a way your participating and supporting it, like people watch violently graphic television cop shows whilst eating there dinner at the family table, everyday!

Although in Inkagi's video, violence being the slapping assault on the victims face in front of the cherry blossom may well have needed to be been more graphically filmed. For example, the with red welts from the smacking on the victims skin is something that may have been slightly more focused within the video thus amplify the sensation that appears to have its histories in Japan in the grand traditions of Yoshitoshi's Warrior Ukiyo-e.

There were several other good videos within this exhibition for instance, Naho Kawabe Drops 2009 appeared at times to resemble a Peit Mondrian painting, until it moved when another drop hit the small pool, it is very clever image making for making someone take notice of an image that appears almost lifeless and static is not easy to do in this world of flickering images that constant sly bombards ones vision.

Miwa Ogasawara's large painting seems to have been partially influenced from the traditions of German romantic landscape painters like Casper David Friedrichs, which is no surprise really as the artist has spent time there, and it's enjoyable to view due to the way the Japanese tend to bring their own idiosyncratic memories into an artwork and integrate them successfully with foreign aesthetic influences. One hopes that such successful artists exchanges such as the Twinism exhibition flourish and grow, well done to all involved from administrators to artists.

English website to exhibition:

http://www.adanda.jp/event/090606_e.html

Pippa Tandy - Salt-Tide - Photographs - Kurb Gallery - Western Australia

2009-06-09T16:02:00.000-07:00

Salt Sunrise - Pippa Tandy

Pippa Tandy presents visual poetry as digital photographs that appears to represent omnipresent hope in a self destructive world. This former utopia (earth) of Tandy's which is illuminated by the sun appears to remain fragile but intact within these photographs, despite what has happened through the industrial and agricultural activities within a given terrain on this once pristine planet. What is so interesting about Tandy's photographs is how sublimely beautiful they are whilst presenting the viewer with a powerful visual irony, being natures optical aesthetic allure and humanities destructive economic violence upon it.

For example; Salt Sunrise is more than just a photographic image about the sun rising over the horizon and pushing back the night, it's about how natures re-appears each day revealing its sublime beauty thus reminding humanity to look after it, and Tandy captures this one moment exquisitely in the way the sun's rays illuminate the salt pan, thus saturating ones senses with its full complement of morning hues, that appears to seep into every part of the motif, from the smallest nuance of orange/salmon pinks within the sky, to the low key grey cream tones, now being subtly overtaken by the warmed soft glows of ochres through the refraction of light from the rising sun.

Fenceline - Pippa Tandy

Tandy's memory(vision) ability to seek out light's visual poetry as it dances and plays with the landscape's public surface (those surfaces the eye can only see) is competent praxis, it's a pleasure to engage and this can be seen in the aesthetics of Fencline as it torments the senses, for one understands that this landscape is now a largish salt lake which is advancing outwards through the destruction of the natural environs and it's toxic to the terrain but it is also so beautiful to engage, for it appears to be landscapes natural order of rhythm and beauty or visual seduction at its very best but laden full of salt toxicity. Fencline also seems Ballardian in it's about beauty and death of a landscape at the right moment to be photographed, nothing could be more opposite but visually seductive as an image, its compelling image making.

Ironically or maybe not so Fencline also resonates biblical sentiments, that in death of all things on earth (including humans), once illuminated through light transcends to great beauty presenting a kind of resurrection, as this photograph resonates and the one thing that one starts to become aware of in Tandy's photograph is how complex the layers of meanings are with them.

Aerated Waters - Pippa Tandy

Aerated Waters certainly stands testament to the complexity of Tandy's image making, for as much as this photograph presents itself in a literal way, the depth and variety of meaning imbued within the image is immense, subtle, powerful and successful.

In the above image Aerated Waters, Tandy's mosaic meanings appears to range from poignancy to Monet's Poplars series of painting, as evidenced in the way hues of sensitive lights filter through the mesh of large and small branches, leaving an awe inspiring majestic sensation, especially by the way sun's illumination cleverly blends and unites the relics of a Western Australian architecture, whilst also animating the graffiti on the skeletal brick bones of the building from those who want to be remembered in this town, which appears to be a sign of desperation within this isolated terrain as the building decays anonymously into the landscape, thus amplifying the poignancy of the image.

This is a good show by Pippa Tandy, it's one of the most critical fine art photography shows in Perth now, so if your near the Kurb Gallery this Saturday June 13th, the opening will be at 4pm by Dr David Bromfield and runs to the 19th of June, the gallery is open from noon to 7pm.

Hiroshi Sugumoto - History of History - National Museum of Art Osaka - Japan

2009-06-02T15:15:00.000-07:00

Hiroshi Sugimoto's exhibition at The National Museum of Art Osaka is sensational, from beginning to end. From the late 1930s mid 1940s Time Magazine covers to his large scale photographic installation of his seascapes of the Caribbean Seas in Jamaica, the quality and quantity of his praxis aesthetic with savvy ideas does not falter, the consistency is stunning.

The installation of the late 1930's mid to late 1940's Time Magazine covers is like a bleak existentialists journey into one of humanities darkest epochs of time, for there is Hitler, Stalin, Himmler, Mussolini, Churchill and Tojo. And what menacing memories some of the afore mentioned can still radiate through their historical actions of evil in the wanton destruction of human beings in the quest for power. Under each Time magazine cover of the combatants leaders or wartime military commander there is statement. For example, underneath Stalin's is facts are stubborn things and Himmler's Terror has come home to roost. How relevant this is right now in Japan as North Korea has staged a recent nuclear blast as well as firing short and long range missiles into the Japan sea. Sugumoto's installation reminds us that history can easily repeat itself right now.

Some of Sugumoto's collection of artifacts from Japan are exquisitely constructed and breath takingly sublime, especially the Fragments of Shosoin textiles (7th Century Japan) that appear loosely in structure to Matisse's paper cut out series. The muted hues of the Shosoin textiles are so poetically constructed, they resonated a harmony from a long ago aesthetic that was sought after by that times artisans, even though these are small textile objects the visual sensations are so memorable. Engaging Sugumoto's artifacts leaves one stunned by the depth and variety of his own considerable praxis museum, if that is what it could be called which ranging from textiles to fossils, its a wonderful to see.

Sugumoto's Jamaican photographs are sublime they're something akin Casper David Friedrichs The monk on the seashore painting but without the misery attached, he has managed in a rather unusual way to capture the texture of the oceans surface as it is gently pushed/caressed in many directions, rippling shining with the afternoon light lazily drifting across the motif. The light breezes as they blow across the sea that causes the liquid texture on the oceans surface in the way the tend to echo the Shosin textiles on show and this is no surprise, for the Japanese have long used nature as inspiration for their aesthetic desires in any medium. Plus how this photographic installations has been presented to the audiences is extraordinarily interesting, for it mimics the curvature of the oceans horizon line, that ones natural vision sees when gazing out to sea, its very clever.

The National Museum of Art Osaka continually puts on amazing exhibitions and this one by Sugumoto is a standout, stunning and anyone studying contemporary photography should surely put him on their research list.

Link to a brief history of Hiroshi Sugomoto (in english) NMAO

http://www.nmao.go.jp/english/b3_exhi_beginning.html

Feel - Video Installation - Chika Mukai - A D & A Gallery - Osaka - Japan

2009-05-29T04:08:00.000-07:00

Feel

Chika Mukai

Sometimes one is lucky enough to stumble across an early career talented fine artist by accident and this happened at the A D & A Gallery in Osaka. The experience of Chika Mukai's video installation titled; feel optically and through audio by the wearing of headphones, one could sense that things might be changing for the better within the video fine arts.

One has seen a lot of video art over three decades, most of it being as boring as batshit (there has been good ones), constructed with flickering crappy loops, woefully supported with a publications dipped or soaked mostly in sewer of arcane pseudo intellectual diatribe which tries to prop up bad video art, that hang like fly blown sheep dags in the scorching summer heat in the Australian wheat belt.

Well one thing for sure Mukai does not fit into the afore mentioned category at all, she is one out there innovative artist, that is not to say there is not issues to be refined within her praxis thematically at the moment, which appears to be partially researching the fine art of hologram eroticism. And what a sexy experience Feel is, gosh! It's not all that common one experiences a young artists savvy sensibility in video art, Mukai appears not to be intimidated by the media, it serves her ideas and praxis well.

Mukai's Feel is like Ballardian science fiction with existentialism attached thus becoming fine art, that creates erotic aspirations/dreams through sound and film, where as the American vision of hope is jaded, faded and disappeared into a fog of darkness or as Ballard quite rightly puts it in the following quote;

The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.

and since Ballard stated that it now appears to be escalating into even more nightmares for everyone as in the case with wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and the American car industries collapse, along with the United States economy.

And to dream in such times of darkness (as Mr Kim of North Korea just lets off an nuclear explosion not so far away) is what is so impressive about the beginning of feel, especially, how sensual Mukai makes the image of her body move around (and what is also interesting is how cleverly constructed the image of her body is for what doesn't know if she is she is nude or wearing something tight, this adds visual tease), behind and in front of the one's own being, which is reflected in the mirror whilst she also allures one through sound thus making one dream.

feel

Chika Mukai

In saying that one is still aware that feel is a video art piece although Mukai has been somewhat successful in blurring the boundaries between film, art and fantasy, for this video is so soaked in sensuality, that a dense weft of erotic memories fill the space of the darkened room, enhanced through the sound of her voice that filters into ones ears whilst wearing the headphones. Then violence interrupts the eroticism through the slashing of a samurai sword why this happens I don't know but it needs to tighten aesthetically if it is to reach the same sensibility that is so wonderfully constructed at the beginning of the video loop, that catches the viewer so unaware and its the element of surprise that unnerves the audience and takes their memories somewhere else.

This was a very good video installation that brings hopes and dreams to those who are lucky enough to view it, particularly in this time of omnipresent war, where it appears that erotic thoughts are a whole lot more nicer to enjoy than violent ones. Mukai is one artist to watch out for in the future.

Link to AD&A Gallery Osaka

http://www.adanda.jp/

Izuno Yuji - Shimada Galleries - Kobe - Japan

2009-05-24T03:21:00.000-07:00

Izuno Yuji

The sensual in art appears to be one of those pre-postmodern (whatever that is but it's nice tricky art phrases often used to confuse the daylights out of you,) themes in art that was common place. Nowadays it seems sensuality in painting is like the last beams of lights from the setting sun's stunning peach salmon pink sun rays, penetrating the blackish grime of so called post modern painting that titillates arts dull pop stardom artists/groupies.

Yuji may not be an art pop star but the sensuality that oozes out of his sculptures will travel time and space for centuries. As much as some of these sculptures by Yuji are of wood, the phenomena in how the sensual sensations resonate from them is visual poetry that effects one as soon as eye contact is made and it is a pleasure to engage.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Yuji within these sculptures has use the idea of western classicism not dissimilar to the French Painter Ingres but unlike the restrained sensuality neo classical painting aspired to, some of these sculptures contain a kind of erotic charge that one sees in the demure poses of Edo ladies in Ukiyo-e prints from the Floating World.

These subtle charges of sensuality by Yuji resonating from within these sculptures are revealed through a slight tilt of the head in the pose and beautifully carved full lips of woman, which appear to contain the sensations of life, and signify a kind of ripening into womanhood, like a maturing grape on a vine. To bring out these sensation through wood in a human form is not easy, its very hard and Yuji has achieved this through his sensibility into carving wood and some smallish bronzes.

A thing is worth what it can do for you, not what you choose to pay for it.

John Ruskin

1819 -1900

English - art critic

Plus it appears that Yuji's study into the classical sculptures from art's histories has also helped him to attain a very high level within his praxis, this is important for its seems nowadays that the history in art is somewhat on the wane within art schools and being replaced it appears by theories on art.

Matisee, Cezanne, Picasso and many other masters of art had one thing in common, they all studied the great artworks at the Louvre. Cezanne in particular did many drawings of sculptures at the Louvre, Picasso stole ideas of every master he could find and had no problem with it as long as it helped his praxis. And neither Picasso or Matisee ever dismissed being able to draw in the classic traditions late into their careers as an artist. So it is particularly interesting to see western classicism used in a very idiosyncratic with Japonism here by Yuji thus presenting a throughly enjoyable and interesting exhibition.

Lee Min-Ho - Portable Landscape (digital photographs) - Gallery Yamaki - Motomachi - Kobe - Japan

2009-05-16T15:59:00.000-07:00

Portable Landscape

Digital Print, 112 cm h x 150 cm w, 2008

As small boy one of my favourite memories was to see the ocean through the gum trees, it was a vision that brought great happiness, mainly because of the colours and still does to look at the ocean through the Japanese pines as Suma beach towards Awaji Island. This visions (memories) stemmed from travelling on family holidays near Bunkers Bay which is situated on the protected eastern side if Cape Naturalist in the South West of Western Australia, which is away from the strong southerly winds which stunt the trees near the coast, leaving the coastline in a semi arid state.

"Memory is the dairy that we all carry about with us".

Oscar Wilde

Lee Min -Ho presents landscapes through various photographed moments that become visual memories, her images in a surreal way, appear like looking at ones daydreams, were random moments collide into a cohesive but ambiguous memory (vision).

Portable Landscape no. 7

Digital Print, 112 cm h x 150 cm w, 2008

"If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream."

Rene Magritte

Belgium Painter

For instance; in Lee Min - Ho's Portable Landscape no.7 there is a beach with the ocean in the not to distant background, that becomes the top of the image, which appears to take the place of the sky in this sea of beach sand. And slantwise from bottom left to top right across the beach is the shadows of to palm trees, that appear like something Matisse may have cut of cerulean grey paper and place on top of the off whitish grey sand. Similarly there is the artist's shadow in the right hand bottom corner, looking like the famous historical photograph of Monet's shadow in the lilly pond, were he was experimenting with painting the depth of light that could penetrate the pond. Juxtaposed against these current memories are past remembrances from another time and space, being the cactus in the case with an image of the sky placed into the top of the compartment, it's like one was asleep and dreaming of being on the beach, then out of no where comes some person one has not seen since childhood or a long dead relative suddenly comes alive, why and how these memories happen is phenomena but they do.

Min-Ho within this exhibition constructs these phenomena's of memories into sophisticated cohesive photographic artworks, not dissimilar to the way Belgium Surrealist Rene Magritte painted his but in a more idiosyncratic mannerism.

The quality of this exhibition and the ideas behind the imagery is well worth spending some considerable time viewing, so if your in Motomachi Kobe take time out to visit Gallery Yamaki Fine Art.

LPA　Large Format Photographers Association of Japan - Old Hyogo Prefecture Museum - Kobe - 2009

2009-05-02T07:15:00.000-07:00

Morning Scenery of Hoarfrost

Mr. Isamu Tamada

The first thing one notices about this exhibition by the LPA members and friends is the passion these photographers have for the Japanese landscape in all sorts of extreme weathers, its seriously impressive, especially in the winter cold, for hours on end the artists with their large camera's wait for the right moment, when their aesthetics demand the click of the button which captures their visual memory from a time of perceived light.

In walking around the exhibition which is large and visually seductive by any standards, the overall sensation that resonates from the photography is just how romantically beautiful Japan is and what is so like able about this show, is how random the motifs have been chosen. For example, from the freezing cold of winter in Hokkaido to the Autumn hues in central Japan, to the saturated moisture in the form of clouds that aimlessly drift through the valleys and mountain peaks of Nippon, dappled in an array of salmon pinks, bronzes, twilight purple greys and golden oranges light rays. It's inspiring stuff, so good that wonders why the Japanese Prime Minister Mr Aso didn't come and have a look because if this exhibition couldn't bring people into Japan just to traverse the terrain with a camera, then nothing could.

The photographers themselves appear to have sort extreme artistic temperament for such romantic imagery could not be achieved without it. Art rarely pays in Japan, so most of these LPA photographers must have job or businesses that supplies the income for this photographic passion, that allows them to get up close and forensically into the terrain, within difficult landscapes to gain a desired idea into a photograph. The stamina and patience needed to get the one idea into a photograph is not for the faint hearted, it's extraordinarily hard work as Mr Tamada photograph stands testament to waiting, searching, visually scanning the terrain and figuring out how the light might effect the motif at any moment, it's like every sensory piece of human data is constantly being checked before button on the camera is clicked.

Once the camera button is clicked there is no guarantees of success, that's the ecstasy and misery of photographic reproduction, no matter what one might of thought they captured within the landscape on film, nothing is certain until the image is up on the wall. So much effort, its either happiness or heartbreak but that's romanticism in photography, there is no half way house of mediocrity as this show stands testament too, it either works as an engaging image or it doesn't.

Photograph by Toshi-Hiro Kato

For example Toshi-Hiro Kato's photograph reminds one of the Italian master painter Caravaggio (1573-1610) use of chiaroscuro (Italian for light-dark) in the way the foreground and the background darkly frame the lone central tree which is illuminated from sun rays breaking through the clouds its photographic impressionism of moment of light within the landscape that the French painter Corot learnt from the Italian painter Pierre Henri De Valciennes in 1826.

The success of Toshi - Kiro's photograph revolves around the moment the shutter on the camera is pressed, this knowledge stems from the memory of aesthetic instinct and habit of returning to landscape to work in front the motif from many times before, sometimes successfully, others not so. Had Toshi-Hiro not pressed the shutter at that time, then the image may not have contained the high romantic drama that imbues it now.

Another issue which is somewhat bewildering is that there is so many good photographs of landscape within this exhibition with a equally refined catalogue this doesn't happen often and when it does its great to see, so if your in Hiroshima this week go and visit it at the Hiroshima Prefectural Museum during 5th thru 10th May.

Hirata Tutsuya - Shimada Gallery - Kobe - Japan

2009-04-18T17:12:00.000-07:00

Painting by Hirata Tutsuya

In walking into Shimada Gallery to see Hirata Tutsuya's exhibition, one was immediately struck by poetics shapes resonating from some very good large scale painting. Hirata's painting large or small are well constructed as a painted image and if the shapes appear simple there anything but for the imageswere laden with highly sophisticated oil traces.

Hirata as one understands through speaking to the Mr Shimada has spent several years refining his praxis by researching his painting surface qualities to equal his vision/memory and through that study he has now gained some of the most savvy painting qualities one has seen recently, and what a visually seductive memory they resonate.

Interestingly and as evidenced within this exhibition Hirata has changed the motif shapes, thus in doing so reveals a determination to shift his painterly surface qualities to another level, which doesn't tend to happen if one changes the idea of painting all the time.

For example, today in having just seen a stunning series of Picasso's at the Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Art from the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Wesrfalen Germany, there tended to be one thing very apparent within Picasso's painting and that was no matter what the idea in the motif was the surface qualities within the images were painted at a very high level and he gives insight to how he does this here:

I also often hear the word evolution. Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in art. If a work cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all ... When I hear people speak of the evolution of an artist, it seems to me that they are considering him standing between to mirrors that face each other and reproduce his image an infinite number of times, and that they contemplate the successive images of one mirror as his past, and the images of the other mirror as his future, while his real image is taken in the present. They do not consider that they are all the same images in different planes. Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse.

And here Hirata has worked on the present within his images, for the oil traces on the surface of the canvas are so engaging. For example if one looks at Hirata's short, frenetic, sharps marks within some of the exhibited paintng, which are juxtaposed to a myriad of well applied flat, slightly thickish and intelligently contructed painted greys strokes, along with greyish whitish hues and liminal traces of blues paint marks, which are cohesively attached to each other with little rupture within the overall image.

This exhibition by Hirata was well worth seeing and his research into gaining insight into surface qualites has been successful. And the surface qaulites of painting are the real measure of whether one can paint or not. Good painting is not just about having an interesting idea behind the image as some kind of aesthetic benchmark. For anybody can have good theories for a canvas but few can paint them really well and Hirata is one of them.

Kevin Robertson on the Goldfields but the painting mother lode is yet to found

2009-04-15T04:01:00.000-07:00

As an artist Kevin Robertson has been on the goldfields of painting for at least two decades. But as Perth supplies his motifs, it does not and probably never will supply the aesthetic conditions for Robertson to hit painterly pay dirt by striking the mother lode canvas.

Robertson as a painter is not an innovator, he is doing something different with his aesthetics, that being his interest is in good painting as this show at GALERIE DÜSSELDORF reveals. The essential problem it appears not only just for Robertson but for everyone else in Western Australia is the library of good painting resides elsewhere in the world, and no matter what one says, if you don't go and study it for sometime your paint traces will stagnate, and this is something that might be seen to happening within his current works.

For if Robertson is to make his mark as a painter by digging into the rich and idiosyncratic fertile ground, such as figurative painting, he has to leave Perth. Yes, this is hard thing to do, its certainly very painful because the comfortable middle class artistic insulation that artists are so used to in Western Australia is going to be suddenly ripped away, when one sees an abundance of master artworks, its a ruthless realization one is confronted with, gosh it's a revealing event.

Standing in front of histories best artists on a regular basis pushes your paint traces to the limit(because you learn what is required to make good painting), along with the surface qualities that come with understanding in how to weave these painterly memories together into an interesting and cohesive image, it takes time, many years in fact, and there is only about three places in the world this will happen on a regular basis, being America, Europe and Japan (in recent conversation it was learned that the Japanese art museums get the best artworks in the world, because they're prepared to pay for them and that is why it is an amazing place to see master paintings).

Robertson's choices are stark, stay in Perth and keep painting the odd gold canvas or travel and live overseas and hit pay dirt, but have no delusions, that journey is not for the faint hearted, its way too tough but the aesthetics results on the cotton duck will come.

This review was constructed from Japan because GALERIE DÜSSELDORF has provided a very good internet coverage of the show and Robertson is a painter worth writing about.

GALERIE DÜSSELDORF link to Robertson show.

http://www.galeriedusseldorf.com.au/GDArtists/Robertson/KRExh2009/index.html

Art Fair Tokyo 2009 and The Great Australian no Show!!!!!

2009-04-04T03:33:00.000-07:00

One of the Japanese Art Magazines at the Fair

none from Australia

After leaving Art Fair Tokyo, one may well be left with a store house full of memories from visually devouring a myriad of imagery. The overwhelming sensation that lingers on, appears to be the idiosyncratic nature of the imagery within the fair. For one's vision was being being pulled in many directions through the optical demands stemming from the sheer strangeness of the artworks, especially coming from a western history of painting.

And in viewing so many interesting exhibits, it is hard name to all the artists/galleries but one must start somewhere. For example; Gallerie Nichido had some very interesting 1960 black American painting, overlayed with transparent photographs, they were really worth spending some time analysing, especially the kinetic innovation with them. Mujin-To Production exhibited stunning black ink wood-block prints by Sachiko Kazama laced with humour, especially the print with the sculpture from Ueno Park in Tokyo of Saigo Takamori and his dog in gas masks.

Art Beatus presented a very strange figurative sculpture in the way of an art work titled: 'Meditation #1' 2008 by Li Yibing. Then there was the very sexy but unusual multi armed, glass fibro coloured sculpture titled:"Asura" 2008 by Masao Kinoshita that looked like something out of Blade Runner 1982 or Star Wars at Unseal Contemporary and the sensual visual texture this artworks resonated was extraordinarily powerful. Gallerie Sho Contemporary Art exhibited the artwork of Giorgio de Chirico "Piazza d Italia" 1955, amongst its Japanese painters, this presented an interesting contrasts of modern painting from differing epochs and cultures.

And after seeing so much local Japanese and international art from almost all round the globe, one felt there that something was missing, and yes! It was my own countries(Australia) effort to be part of an international art fair, in one of the most interesting, critical and important venues in the world.

Such absence of Australian art appears really inexcusable, even kind of unbelievable on an official cultural level, that at such an important art fair as the one in Tokyo, being so close to Australia, not one exhibit managed to present itself from down under. And lets remember the Prime Minister of Australia has been flying around trying to make an impact on the world stage, well if this is my and his countries impact, being the complete abscence of everything, it would seem to be very hurtful for the the artists, the Australian public at home and travelling abroad and the commercial galleries who spend their lives devoted to visual culture.

Opportunities for Australian artist's internationally need to be made, its not easy that's for sure but it has to be done, to present cultural imagery which is laden with the nations visual diversity and exhibited with a unity, that on the most part promotes visual tolerance, which is one of the great riches of Australian visual culture. Sadly, such a good opportunity to present Australian culture has be lost for the now at the Art Fair Tokyo and if this was the effort so far, the future does not bode well for Australian artists.

Congratulations to the organisers of Tokyo Art Fair for a job well done in creating the curious, the aesthetic measures one makes for themselves and ideas exhibited.

Art Fair Tokyo website:

http://www.artfairtokyo.com/en/index.html

Megumi Sakakibara - Shimada Galleries - Kobe - Japan

2009-03-21T21:47:00.000-07:00

Painting by Megumi Sakaibara

Megumi Sakaibara is a young painter with a long career ahead of her and will no doubt be interesting if this show is anything to go by. Like many young painters they have influences from local teachers this has be going on since the time of Michelangelo. But sooner or later the student, after guidance, must make their won unique trek outwards to unseen painting horizons and this is the hard part about being a painter, for such journeys are not easy.

Seek the strongest color effect possible... the content is of no importance.

Henri Matisse

There is much to learn about when one creates the intermediate space between artist and teacher. For example; the painter has to learn and develop there unique system of painting in praxis, this is exciting time in the studio with a head full of ideas but its certainly very hard.

In Sakaibara's case it seems she is in a transitional period of leaving the teacher and forging new painterly horizons and its an interesting start, for in sighting her artworks they reminded one of the British Painter Patrick Heron (see link), the hue relationships in size, shape and texture within some of the images is interesting but being young the praxis is raw, but visually engaging and this is a competant beginning towards unknown painterly terrains.

It takes a long time in painting to get surface qualities on the canvas to a point where one might even be happy with them. Cezanne, Monet and many others complained throughout their painterly careers how hard good painterly surfaces was to achieve, although in this show by Sakakibara, as evidenced within these paintings she has consolidated some interesting painting territory, and in time will progress further outwards, thus bring a range of memories that will make the paintings get better through time.

Heron Link:

http://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=6149&searchid=9296

Kayo Nomura K A I Gallery - Kobe - Japan

2009-03-19T19:02:00.000-07:00

Painting by Kayo Nomura

Spring is in Japan and if these paintings on show at the KAI Gallery are anything to go by it looks like a lively season to be visiting the galleries. Nomura is a young painter and her acceleration in understanding surface qualities on the canvas, that animate her ideas about flowers, reveals the study she has been doing in praxis is starting to pay off well.

It's not easy painting flowers and many a fine art master has tackled the subject matter from Claude Monet to Georgia O'Keefe, the colour, form and texture, along with one's own synthesis in painting integrates to construct the image the artist desires, sometimes successfully, other times not so, that is just how art is at times.

Painting by Kayo Nomura

Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time.

Georgia O'Keefe - American Painter

Therefore within this exhibition these two paintings (seen above) by Nomura appear to be the most successful because the sensations they resonate. And as Georgia O'Keefe stated; it takes time analyse the sensations of hue within the flower. Nomura has given a very good account of her painterly analysis within her praxis in these two image, for they're applied with interesting surface qualities, this type of painting is certainly not easy to achieve as it takes time to acquire such a painterly sensibility and she has made a considerable praxis progression within these images.

Nomura's is maturing exceedingly well considering she is no where near even mid career, its impressive image making. For example; in the top painting, the way the motif sits within the canvas, largish but not overpowering or even looking awkward is a cleverly constructed motif. The other painting of the plum blossom spreads horizontally across the canvas, in large ranges of pinks, light rose plums hues, thus animating the visual joy of the Japanese spring, it's a pleasure to engage.

So if your in Kobe try and get to the KA I gallery to see this show its an enjoyable experience.

German Artist Florian Sussmayr - Gallery Yamaki - Kobe

2009-03-13T06:10:00.000-07:00

Florian Sussmayr

The article associated with this exhibition is as interesting as the show itself in some ways, not because it's a knockout piece of literature (it's interesting that's for sure) but the assumptions referred to in it on painting, that somehow using a brush to make oil traces on canvas has to justify its existence, historically and now.

It seems there is always going to be, as shown in the past and now, that there is carpet baggers wanna be's, who hang around the art world espousing a kind of banal, quasi intellectual diatribe that with any kind of forensic analysis reveals their statements on art are almost completely unfounded, especially their ideas about painting, for example; is it still relevant?

The simple answer is that if someone is doing it (painting), it's relevant and if the image is executed in an interesting way (even if the spectator is not there during the praxis but only experiences, the deteriorating end common standpoint through time and space of the image) then a more forensic inquiry may be needed, that is if one is interested enough to find out why this particular painting, resonates within one's memory.

As this is the case in entering this show by Florian Sussmayr for some of his paintings are more interesting than others, especially the one in the above photograph. One finds themselves gazing at this bottle, left on shelf, in what looks like a small but abject space within this world, with a myriad of depressing sentiments flooded into current thinking. In a way Suyssmayr's well painted melancholy, imbued within space of the room containing the bottle, reminded one of the German artist Casper David Friedrich, especially his painitng with that bleak god forsaken image of The Monk on the Seashore and what a miserable oil this is, it's like not even those in hell want to visit the place .

The Monk on the Seashore
Casper David Freidrich - German Romantic

And in a way this bottle just left unthinkingly in a room somewhere in Germany, contains all the afore mentioned sentiments, it's like an iconic poisoned chalice, where abject or even an unending state of anomie will be the only reward for those who drink from it. It's as God forsaken as the beach Freidrich's Monks stands upon now, as it is viewed upon through time an space. The bottle appears to be imbued with the stench of claustrophobic misery caused by the confined space it is pictorially placed in, it's clever painting by Sussmayer and probably the best painting within the whole show, for it contains a weft of sustained melancholy that is seldom experienced with the visual arts nowadays.

So if your in Motomatchi Kobe do go to see this most interesting painting show it will be visually rewarding.

In Memory of Arthur Russell - Artist - Western Australia

2009-03-03T05:29:00.000-08:00

The setting of the moon and the coming of the new day

Western Australia

The passing of Arthur Russell will be felt by many in Western Australia for he was generous as a person and a facilitator of art. Having Russell as a lecturer was an interesting experience, his passion for some of the traditions of drawing, as well as innovation in art was obvious and in some ways helped formulate many career of Western Australian artists, as well as his own impressive ouvere.

There is no doubt that the Arthur's passion in art resonates out of his artworks and these memories as seen within his drawn traces will travel time and space, to be experienced by future generations of artists to learn from a make drawn marks to new horizons.

If you wish to see Russell's fine art please click on the link

Arthur Russell's Drawings:

http://www.galleryeast.com.au/Drawing/aRussell/main.htm

Kikuko Sakota - Shimada Gallery - Kobe

2009-02-28T06:02:00.000-08:00

Kikuko Sakota is a travelled artist and along the way she has gleaned much knowledge from various painters. The exhibition she has just had at Shimada Galleries stands testament to a ongoing developing and life long praxis, that will end either when she is incapable of putting brush to canvas or decides not to as some artists do.

Sakota painting's are about memories of how she experiences colour in life and in someway they remind one of American Abstraction but essentially they're Japanese remembrances of coloured gestural traces in a variety of hues from hot pinks, saucy lip stick deep reds, with neon purple cobalt blues, with swirling lines of yellowish lime greens that remind one of the joys that will eventuate from the coming Japanese spring.

These painted memories resonate Sakota's apparent happiness in life, they may well let the audience indulge in the exhibition's carnival of colour which is visual pleasure amongst the onset of the realities from financial gloom that tends to have set around the world like an omnipresent miserable cold drizzle.

There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.

Bridget Riley - British Painter

Everyone's aesthetics are different and one might have wanted a more thickish painterly quality within some of the images but that is personal taste, one felt it may have just charged the sensations resonating from the paintings a little bit more, bringing the audiences closer to the visual delights that saturates the ambiance of this exhibition space.

Sakota's exhibition was a good antidote to the current recession taking place in Japan and everywhere else, it was reassuring to see an artist stand and deliver such hope in painting. But Sakota and like many other artists throughout history, who present exhibitions of vision in troubled times is not entirely unexpected, for painters have always revealed to the world there is another way of experiencing things around us.

European Still-Life Painting from the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien - Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Art

2009-02-19T05:41:00.000-08:00

Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Art - Kobe - Japan

Hyogo Prefecture Museum most recent exhibition titled; European Still-Life Painting contains some amazing centuries old painted imagery by the likes of Velazquez's and his image the "Margarita" and Cornelis De Heem "Breakfast still-life" around 1660 - 1670, it's a breath taking exhibition because the artworks painted are from so long ago and contain a modernity in the paint traces as if they were painted yesterday and that's the interesting issue.

Paintings travel time and space, even if they were rendered on canvas many centuries ago, they also bring those memories into the contemporary now and as they're visually experienced by audiences/artists/historians/curators with the naturally occurring interjecting memories, interlocking onto the current remembrances.

Strangely though, the now in contemporary painting is somehow missing in many these big exhibitions that are seen. For example, where are the painters of Hyogo who are interested in still life, why aren't they placed close to this exhibition, it puzzles one to see this absence of contemporary art, and missing from its connection to these great historical paintings. For these historical painting ideas have travelled time and space to meet contemporary ideas in art now.

And if such historical/contemporary painting are never shown together, how can any civilization in the now make a comparisons, especially in relationship to their particular terrain. What are the benchmarks in that style of painting? What has been gleaned by the local artists? And in what ways did Japanese artists, with their own unique histories in painting become influenced by these European master artworks.

It is not that one historical group of painting from a region is better than other artist's, who use similar motifs, from distant places in another way, with differing aesthetic desires, this is what makes art so interesting. What might be more visually absorbing is to see these centuries old painted motifs, sitting next to contemporary Hyogo artists and then to exmanine the influential historical references and how they connect it to this terrain now in art.

The afore mentioned artistic comparisons would seem important for current and future generations, to see how painterly progressions come about, from what can be gleaned in knowledge from not only local artista but foreign influences as well . This is a very good show at Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Art and well worth spending some considerable time examining the artworks.

Link to show:

http://www.artm.pref.hyogo.jp/eng/exhibition/index.html

Eleanor Heartney – An American Opinion - coming to the Perth Festival of Art

2009-02-09T04:03:00.000-08:00

Life Photographer - Robert Kirkland

Recently in the Australian Newspaper there was an article about the American art critic Eleanor Heartney and how she is to deliver a lecture for the Festival of Perth, this was read with interest, especially coming from Perth and now residing in Japan amongst so many international exhibiting artists here but it appears they will apparently remain anonymous, as long as Victoria Laurie so rightly puts it down to, western art egocentricity.

Heartney’s will present her views on art, along with her book Art & Today, where she presents to her readers four hundred artists with almost half being American, tends to look a little bias at best. For imagine, if someone wrote a book on 400 critical artist’s now, with nearly half coming from China, 50 from Japan, 45 from Australia/South East Asia/New Zealand and the rest a sprinkling of British, American and European. Would readers consider it an objective analysis? They might depending which country there from.

As one reads a little more, the article it becomes a little more puzzling, mainly because Heartney seems a trifle ironic. Why did Heartney produce a book nearly 3kg in weight and 440 pages long, when it appears she is so concerned about the environment? As much as Heartney might be Internet savvy, she strangely didn’t make her book Art & Today, an electronic one and sell it via the web, so nothing of excess was produced, to the detriment of the environment, it certainly would be in keeping with her most admirable concerns about the environment.

There is also the very interesting issue of the electronic arts or as Heartney puts it; "For example, the impact of technology is going to be huge. As artists gain new tools, they'll start bending them and allowing the technology to do new things.” this may be true but more importantly (and it seems not discussed) is how art internet nomads like myself, have to deal with censorship and art.

As recently as the last Olympic Games, countries cried freedom of the press. Which brings into sharp focus that the electronic arts are at the mercy of who controls the power, controls the artwork exhibited in any government funded gallery or private. It’s alright to bend rules and break them etc..., as long as those in power, allow you to have some, for the audience to view it.

This statement by Heartney is also a little odd; The feminist art movement is important and does tend to have a narrative, and women artists brought the body back into art, this a tad bewildering because one never knew that the body had left art or needed to come back, for artists like Lucian Freud, Paula Rego and David Hockney have used the body as a motif for decades.

Whatever one’s thoughts of Heartney’s statements she is to be admired for what she has achieved in art and her beliefs on the environment, it’s not easy to do, the world is no doubt wiser and more tolerant place for her opinions, they’re important, especially in terrains where artist’s rights are diminishing in certain countries or they don’t have any at all. An AK47 can certainly change your imagery if it’s pointed at you. There is no doubt Heartney’s lecture will be thought provoking and timely for a thoroughly insulated city like Perth.

Link to City of Perth Festival Tickets to the Heartney Lecture

http://www.mytickets.com.au/art-and-today-eleanor-heartney-perth-international-arts-festival/1-348468/view.aspx

Article in the Australian Newspaper
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24992890-5013571,00.html

Kaito Saiko - Gallery Yamaki - Motomachi - Kobe - Japan

2009-02-01T02:12:00.000-08:00

Kaito Saiko painting of the French Landscape

Kaito Saiko finished her fine arts degree in Japan then moved to Paris and it shows, the surface qualities within these images are interesting, not only for the way the traces a layered upon the canvas but by the way the images resonate a sensation of the Australian landscape, specifically of the painter the Russell Drysdale, this sensorial attribute is not deliberate but maybe some kind of phenomena, that happens when differing landscapes are painted by two culturally independant artists.

The Drovers Wife - Russell Drysdale c 1945

Drysdale during his life as a painter had made the comment; that the Australian landscape consisted of a large sky and a very low horizon and in viewing Saiko's exhibition a similar remembrance of painted vision emanates from the canvases with this exhibition.

It may be that coming from mountainous Japan and Saiko in visiting/painting the flat terrain in parts of the French countryside was impressed or even overwhelmed, that one could see so far without interruption of the natural (mountains) or the unnatural (large cities) that is so omnipresent in Japan.

The progression of a painter's work as it travels in time from point to point, will be toward clarity.. toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea.. and the idea and the observer.. To achieve this clarity is inevitably to be understood.

Mark Rothko

What also quickly becomes apparent in viewing these artworks is that they seem to trigger the sensation of silence for the viewer, there muted, uncluttered and in their own way, tend to contain some metaphysical quality that allows meditation to enter ones realm of thinking. If anything the landscape within these paintings by Saiko, tend to serve as a doorway or the beginnings of another journey within one's memory. Rothko springs to mind when viewing Saiko's paintings, and other certain kinds of painted phenomenology which is very hard to define because memory is so individual but exists as can be experienced in this show.

It will be interesting to Saiko's next show, to see what happens or even if the landscape will still be within her next series of images. But there is no doubt that Saiko is travelling towards a certain personal clarity in painting, this is a hard issue to resolve in praxis, it's a tough path. Rothko stands testament to that journey. If your in Motomachi take some time out and visit this interesting exhibition.

Hiroyuki Sugawara - Futaba Gallery - Ginza - Tokyo

2009-01-25T21:13:00.000-08:00

Exhibiting in Tokyo - Ginza is not for the faint hearted, it's about as tough a place for any artist could want to show their artworks, plus very bloody expensive that's for sure. Such commitment by artists who do venture into that terrain, whether they are part of the established or rental gallery system does not matter there effort is admirable by any measure.

There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.

Henry Moore

British Sculptor

So after being totally lost in Ginza for about and hour, then accidentally coming across the Futuba Gallery again, which was showing the extremely fragile glass praxis of Hiroyuki Sugawara.

On first visual contact Sugawara artistic praxis looks like it is made out of some kind of transparent plastic piping, rising out of the galleries cement floor, the tube like objects independently and collectively seem to be searching out some kind of imaginary end common standpoint, that appears to have no end at all, other that what is experienced in the now within the gallery.

Examining an artist's praxis is mostly interesting, for it allows the audience a chance to see if the system of making with its current traces within the artwork, are equal to the theory, and in Sugawara's case, it does, the artworks appear to be making a trek outwards, towards an unknown horizon, which is a typical of innovative art, there is no known prescribed outcome. How fragile is Sugawara's glass artworks appear, and are very sensitively but well constructed as they twist slowly upwards with the electric light above them snaking through, around up and down. Which makes these transparent tubes of glass, radiate a myriad of light ochre, bluish grey hues and tones, that is a visual pleasure to engage.

In Sugawara's artworks the unity and diversity of these kinetic hues that go in, through and around these glass sculptures present what one might suggest is visual poetry, a symphony of ochres, greys, whitish blues with its accompany subtleties of tones and contrasts, its sensorially pleasurable to experience and the artist allowed me to touch the objects, which was really generous of him for they looked and felt extremely delicate.

This is an interesting fine art show at the Futaba Gallery in Ginza well worth a look.

Hisao Sakai & Shimada Gallery Collection - Shimada Gallery - Kobe

2009-01-18T15:52:00.000-08:00

One of the great issues about visiting galleries in Japan that is diiferent from Australia is one is not being familiar with the language, so there is no problem with the text (as English is the only written language learned so far) that often accompanies so many exhibitions in the far south west.

There for not understanding written Japanese, then forces one to read the paint surface qualities more intensely because visual language in paint traces is universal, its either interesting or it's not. That is not difficult to understand because your sensations are either going off the personal radar or asleep, this idea is elaborated on here in the Guardian Newspaper:

In his entertaining book, What Good Are the Arts?, Prof John Carey has a go at what we'll have to call the artistic discourse. There's a nice little section on the use of the word "difficult". Carey quotes John Tusa, then managing director of the Barbican, who links "absolute quality" in art with the demands it makes of its audience. Tusa's context is opera: "The fact is that opera is not like dipping into a box of chocolates. It is demanding, difficult." Carey has some fun with this idea - "What is difficult about sitting on plush seats and listening to music and singing?" - before moving on to high modernist art in general.

Mathematical problems and crosswords can be called "difficult" because they have correct solutions that are hard to work out. Art - a poem, a picture - can rarely be solved in this way, and in any case "what does it mean?" is widely considered among contemporary artists to be the crassest of all questions. Carey suggests we need a different term: "Our normal word for things that cannot be understood is 'unintelligible'."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/17/art-buying-recession

Then when entering Hisao Sakai's exhibition one was immediately confronted with imagery that seemed to be hybrid of fine art and Japanese manga in paint, it is a very hard exhibition to label, the best one can say it is that it is a very idiosyncratic show, plus interesting to see how the images are constructed, with paint that is dripped, applied loosely, scratched and silkily caressed across the canvas with intermittent pencil marks applied throughout, which makes for interesting viewing.

There is no doubt that Sakai's journey as an artist is early - mid career and interesting to see, the system of praxis will hopefully develop, shift and become more savvy, as more ideas start to shift his methods of painting. So if your in Kobe do go to this artist show at Shimada Gallery its well worth the effort.

Whilst there visit the Shimada Gallery's collection, its great viewing, with some very interesting idea's from the Kobe avant garde to good paintings are on show, what is also enjoyable is that the collection contains as a variety of content within the imagery, that certainly pushes the boundaries of tolerance in fine arts, and this is essentially what any civilized society should be doing, to create a peaceful ambiance with the world, this show is certainly worth viewing.

link to Sakai's webpage:
http://hisoart.com/

Important Lecture at CAP House Kobe at O2

2009-01-13T02:35:00.000-08:00

Please click on flyer to get full details

CAP House is an artists run space, it's interesting, and exhibits local/international artists artworks. So, if your an Australian artist or any other for that matter, looking for a good quality artspace to do a project in or exhibition, this is a fantastic, lateral thinking artspace, very rare nowadays, well worth the effort.

There is English speaking staff within the complex who are more than helpful and polite.

contact

3-19-8 Yamamoto-dori, Chuo-ku Kobe 650-0003 JAPAN Phone/fax +81(0)78-230-8707

e-mail: caphouse@cap-kobe.com

http://www.cap-kobe.com/

English link

http://www.cap-kobe.com/e/index.htm

20 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art - The National Museum of Art Osaka

2009-01-06T06:42:00.000-08:00

Catalogue is a very informative read in English

A stunningly curated contemporary art exhibition, gosh it's a knock out show, it ranges from humorous to the very extremes of human endurance, this is one out there exhibition and this is in no small way, not only due to the Chinese artists themselves but also to the savvy way the curators of this museum have presented it, there is no doubt this is a bench mark for exhibiting radical art within a major museum.

The museum in presenting this very cutting edge exhibition of recent modern Chinese artistic praxis, which at times, is not like refined good painting or sculpture but raw and in your face, resonating unending grating sensations directly onto ones nervous system, with no where to escape but to leave the space of the artwork has really set a precedent of how well it can be done.

Although, some of the artworks contain a sophistication, that is so unbelievably well constructed it leaves one in sheer awe at the effort, as evidenced in the artwork titled; Tomorrow with its life size human forms in wheel chairs, this is an amazing, randomly kinetic installation, which leaves the viewer asking more questions, about the nature of delay from the time one is born and their efforts in life until death, it's a very strange artwork but stunning to experience.

Another really enjoyable video installation is Rabid Dogs exhibiting several Chinese artists with faces painted like likeable puppies and acting like dogs do everyday life but this is in a corporate office. One enjoyable moment, amongst many is the dog's turd being served up in a bosses accounts book, how relavant to the now as this economic Tsunami washes over the great human masses, leaving them unemployed. Rabid Dogs with the sniffing, grovelling office sex antics for a bone, appears to be a mirror on daily corporate life and its bloody hilarious at times.

There is just to many good exhibits in this show to write about them all but it certainly will be one of the most memorable exhibitions seen recently and the curators/artists efforts contributed to this greatly. So if your in Japan this is one show not to be missed.

The National Museum of Arts website:

http://www.nmao.go.jp/english/home.html

Painters I admire amongst todays arts industry.

2008-12-28T15:36:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year

Many times recently whilst viewing art galleries (major and commercial) there has appeared to be something missing, something that has been nagging for sometime. The deceased English art critic Peter Fuller kind of put his finger on in the 1980's, with his theory of Theoria (which was about a higher aesthetic, on his say so, nice attempt but only a singular measure being his)which is flawed by the concept of singular control

But in someways, Fuller was touching on something that has been missing in fine art for several decades now. The issue tends to present itself when viewing great master artworks, especially their idiosyncratic sensibility in painting; meaning that some artists were and in very limited cases still just so good, so stunning in ability, that their images stops one in there tracks. These artists are not about brand labels, nor blatant art industry market capitalism passing itself off as art, as it appears to the case when governments label art as an industry? Is it good art or even competent?

Gosh! there appears to be nowadays been so much art being made and being passed off as serious art, that maybe, the financial crash is going to be good thing to happen. Artists may well have to slow down and think we are not an industry, and never were, and is this the best art I can make? Have I really pushed the paint to the extremes of my unknown sensibility in painting and beyond ? And what kind of horizon am I looking at now! Maybe, that is what Fuller might have been looking for, instead of academic theory, just a statement, of what was happening and what could be done to change course. And probably, the best way to do that, is to continually go great art shows and learn from the paint traces of the masters, and how they equal the intention of the artist's idea.

The Family of Charles IV, 1800.
by

Francisco Goya

Theopile Gautierpoet/critic described the figures as looking like "the corner baker and his wife after they won the lottery.

The above painting reminds one of how rich or self important people, no matter what they wear at times, cannot hide their stupidity which appears is almost permanently etched into their faces. Goya had this penetrating gaze as an artist, that nothing seemed to escape from and how he articulated that memory in paint traces, then onto canvas is breathtaking, as this image stands testament too as do many others (his etchings are also worth looking at). This image remains on my must study list of great paintings.

Jas de Bouffan, 1885-1887.
by
Paul Cezanne

Cezanne's painting remains an idiosyncratic enigma, every time one of his paintings come within viewing range, a long time is spent examining the paint traces and one never ceases to learn something new from the visual experience.

Rouen Cathedral, Facade (sunset)1892-1894,

Claude Monet

This series of Monet's Rouen Cathedral paintings are extremely radical, especially in the way he has laid down the oil traces with such a density. One wonders if the American painter Jackson Pollack ever studied this series because the surface qualities are just so extreme, even though the motif is so seemingly conservative.

Ville d’Avray circa 1867

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot

Corot was painter who's tonal oil touches on canvas, especially the silver hues, are so precise to the vision (memory) of that moments light, as seen from the public surfaces of the landscape, it leaves one in awe as to how he did it. Any show of Corot is really worth spending some considerable time examining his landscape paintings, and his portraits of women, that have their own appeal.

Self portrait by Rembrandt, (1661).

Rembrandt paints so well and so often, it seems he had acquired some sort of phenomenological ability. But the reality is for any painter, that it is just hard work day to day, to get good. And how good one can get as an artist is revealed here within Rembrandt's oeuvre. In seeing his artworks one always walks away thinking " I wish"!

Les Bergers d'Arcadie by1637-1638

Nicolas Poussin

This is a great painting by Poussin, a knock out, the way he has manipulated the paint to resonate even the most minute detail within the motif is stunning. For instance, the lace on the sandal, on the left hand foot of the women in a blue gown is almost unbelievable painting, and the golden hues within women's worn fabric are equally laid down in paint traces, that appear so easily applied, so calligraphic, it is almost rendered without thinking but that is not the case at all. This image is well worth studying for some considerable time.

One of the benefits about living in Japan is one gets to see many of the worlds great master artworks, all the time, as they travel through major museums here and this surely helps one's painting.

Miki Toshie - Gallery K.A.I - Kobe Japan

2008-11-28T21:58:00.000-08:00

Miki Toshi's artworks hang on the walls of the gallery like some inner suspension of memories. The artworks collectively viewed in the K. A.I appear strange, for reasons that seem particular hard to narrow down into words, such phenomena is not easy to write about.

Miki presents some of the artworks as a kind of living sensual memory frozen in time, yet resonating to the audience through differing moments, for how long one does not know, it is like looking a memory in super slowed motion, juxtaposed this is one's own experience of sensuality, with all its history spewing out like film freed from its reel into the gallery space, thus interjecting into the current moments of thought now.

For instance, in the photograph above there is an object, which is in hot pink tacky hues, puffed, inflated and in some areas receding, its surface is of a tired shinning looking material, as if from some run down 1970's ladies fashion boutique shop window that sells lame style desires. How Miki has managed to conjure such memories into the above object is clever, and reveals her as an artist that unravels the quixotic belief that fashion makes a person someone more than they really are in life.

The pink artwork for all its tacky sensuality brings to mind this statement by Germaine Greer; "Loneliness is never more cruel than when it is felt in close propinquity with someone who has ceased to communicate”, and to regurgitate someones old quixotic belief in fashion as an artwork, that amplifies the sensation of someone looking in the mirror with the latest styles in clothing on, realising the audience with never notice creates the most loneliest of acts.

This show by Miki is in your face, it races more questions than it answers, it makes the viewer use their own memories to create interesting and expanding paradigms of critical visual engagement that eventuates, either consciously or unconsciously of what we sensorially engage outside the gallery, this is a clever show.

Ten Artists - Gallery Shimada – Kobe – Japan

2008-11-13T15:10:00.000-08:00

Artwork by Kashiwamoto Ryuta

There seems at the moment two divergent strains of art one is the avant-garde in whatever form that might take, the other is good painting, none better than the other or more critical. This show at Gallery Shimada represents good painting at its idiosyncratic best. This group of ten artist have also been exhibited at Galleria Schubert, Italy.

The artist showing are Ichino Hideki, Inaki Naoki, Imai Mitsutoshi, Kashiwamoto Ryuta, Kusakabe Naoki,Kawano Tomio, Minamiguchi Seiji, Negaki Mutsuko, Ogawa Ko and Sakurai Akimasa, what is immediately obvious about this exhibition is the good quality of the artworks, in particular the sensibility they have with medium and systems used to create a cohesive aesthetic throughout each image on show.

Another good painting within the group of exhibitors

It is not that often that a group of ten artists produce a really competent body of work, it's daunting when it is done and it is compelling viewing, not only from the unity and diversity of the ideas, but how the sensations from the painting's resonate into one's memory.

One of the most notable issues about painting in Japan, compared to Australia is the quantity and quality of good artists (and there is a lot of them) that paint, especially the surface qualities within the artworks, maybe it is because so many master artworks are within the national collections of modern art, along with the grand innovative traditions of the local Kano School masters, plus the diverse international art collections that continually come through country, whatever it is it has left an impressive legacy as evidenced here.

For example, the top painting by Kashiwamoto Ryuta is very savvy, for it captures a person in a pensive moment of thought and the quality of oil traces really amplifies that sensation, especially how the light illuminates territories of skin, rendering the head static but the thought process is seemingly going on inside the women's head, it's good painting. It appears Kashiwamoto has spent some time examining European masters surface qualities from the Italian sixteenth century art masters, plus there appears to an influnce in surface qualities from the English painter Francis Bacon, and these memories of learning are now manifested into her unique idiosyncratic system of painting.

Artwork by Negaki Mutsuko

Negaki Mutsuko imagery consists of real world appearances transcending themselves into some kind of spiritual metaphysics and her imagery may well have appealed to the English Christian art critic John Ruskin, who almost demanded from God that he reveal himself in nature. The Japanese have a long history of looking towards nature for inspiration and here Negaki allows the appearance of external space to became a gate-way for a personal spiritual phenomena to articulate itself into a painted memory.

In some ways Negaki's imagery reminds one of the light piercing through stained glass windows as seen during the day in Gothic Christian churches, this is meant to represent the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ, that he was conceived through phenomena, a virgin (being Mary) birth, that light could transcend through something solid (glass) and illuminate a dark interior( a church or womb for conception). Negaki's imagery is gentle but so well construct its a pleasure to view.

So if your in Kobe this a small museum quality show and well worth visiting at Gallery Shimada

Culture Day Japan and a visit to Itami Art Museum - Hyogo Prefecture - Japan

2008-11-05T00:15:00.000-08:00

The Japanese Garden at Itami Museum

What a great idea Culture Day is in Japan, everyone gets to have a holiday and to participate in some form of the arts. So the visit to Itami Art Museum was an absolute treat, full of activities ranging from Japanese Tea ceremonies, international ceramic exhibitions, a retrospective of Yoshi Zyun Mukai (1901 - 1995) paintings and drawings, plus one very relevant show of prints by the French Artist Honore Daumier.

The tea ceremony at the entrace of the Museum with the Japanese ladies in their kimonos provided a very elegant and graceful setting, it was almost like an installation of communal aesthetics were unity and diversity in attire blended in with the terrain of the museum.

Exhibition Flyer from Itami Museum

The first gallery viewed was the retrospective of Yoshi Zyun Mukai (1901 - 1995) paintings and drawings, which contained some of his earlier painting studies from time spent in the Louvre, as evidenced by the artworks seen in the advertisement flyer from the museum above, especially in the right hand top corner is a nude which he had studied from the artwork of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting of Venus Anadyomène.

It is interesting to see the original Venus Anadyomène (see image below) and Yoshi's trained Japanese remembrances of image making and how the brush traces vary from master to student. Another interesting point about the Venus Anadyomène painting is that the idea women actually looked liked this almost completely hairless, had manifested itself into the memory of the influential and very Christian English Art Critic John Ruskin, who thought all women were like Ingres's painting of a classical Greek goddess, containing no hair whatsoever, other what was on their head, when all was revealed to him on his wedding night and he realised women had pubic hair, he fled from his wife on their wedding night and never consummated the marriage, they were finally divorced some seven years later.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting of Venus Anadyomène.

Back to Yoshi who it seems to have followed Corot's attempts in painting the Japanese landscape directly from the motif outdoors on many occasions, and in so doing he captured a disappearing Japan, as the influence of modernism became omnipresent, with its apparent lack of charm and grace. It is Yoshi's passionate record of traditional Japan that makes his painting so interesting.

As the world recoils in disbelief as to were the money went, as economies faultier one after another, one wonders if anything has or will change from Daumier's time on earth. If anything, Daumier within these series of prints reveals to us now that those self interested groups, who control power, to articulate legally binding decrees, which there for subjegate the rest of the societal memory as to what one is allowed to do. And this was not lost on Daumier, who produced a body of work, that is so caustic in revealing the power hungry's deceits. Daumier's prints can be so easily understood by all because it's not in solely text, with words that can be manipulated with any ease, it's in very understood imagery, namely being well attired rich men and women stealing from each other and the poor, its a great show.

A good book on Honore Daumier available at the museum

Lastly, there is this great little book which can bought from the museum shop titled; One Hundred Haiku Cards by Kakimori Bunko and after seeing the Daumier exhibition this Haiku poems seems apt.

Uo kute

Kuchi namagusashi hiru no yuki

Natsume Seibi

Interpretation: Watching the thawing snow in the afternoon, I feel fishy smell of fish I ate for lunch a little while back to my mouth.

Season word: Snow (winter)

Seibi was born in Edo (Tokyo) in 1749. He was a banker. His family and relatives were good at haikai, but Seibi did not not belong to any particular school. He died in 1816

Explanation: 'The thawing snow' in this haiku should be taken not as something pure. but as something corrupt that corresponds to the disagreeable smell in one's mouth.

If anything one walks away from Itami Art museum of on Culture Day with a much better sense of what might be good and what might be evil, and that is why art galleries are important because they should not moralise or put ethics up but maybe simply present imagery for the audience's societal memory to engage in to make their own decisions, free from prejudices, as much as that can be done, it was a really interesting day and the museum is well worth spending sometime in for there is much visual information to be gleaned..

Link to Itami Art Museum:

http://www.artmuseum-itami.jp/general_info/general_info_e.html

Wantanabe Nobuko - Gallery Yamaki Fine Art - Motomachi - Kobe - Japan

2008-10-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

Blue on White by Wantanabe Nobuko

It is easy to walk into an exhibition and suggest that the influence upon this particular artist could be this painter or from that period of art, but at times it takes careful looking at an artwork to see the difference. In Wanatanabe's exhibition on show at Gallery Yamaki now and as much as it may well look like something Frank Stella had created, the synthesis of the artist as seen in this gallery is not only subtle but raises more questions than it answers. Wantanabe's artworks are large but contain minimal shifts in the way object is created in form and hue, but there is small adjustments within the overall shape making it interesting to experience and has substantial impact on one's vision.

For example; both artworks as seen within this blog are situated on the wall of the gallery, coloured textilea are pulled tensely over each wooden frame. The frames of the object are at least twenty five centimeters deep, so the colour of the textiles wraps around the side of the object, this creates interesting nuances of light which are refracting off the objects onto the galleries wall. So the gallery space around the object becomes as essential to viewing the artwork itself, these are strange sensations indeed.

Yellow/White by Wantanabe Nobuko

Furthermore, the surface of the textiles are tightly stretched over the structure and contain the historical sensations of chiaroscuro, because of the cloth's curvature and how light recedes into the dark corner of the frames. The objects chiaroscuro appears to resonate the artists emotions and deconstructs any kind of preconceived formalism. The artworks also appear to contain a romantic quality it's like a symphony of sensations from two colours, that changes as one walks around the objects.

This is clever art and unusual, for every calculation that the artist has made, it moves outwards into unseen horizons to be enjoyed. These objects are visual treats and in a way they also appear highly kinetic as experienced through the every changing visual shapes as one moves around them, and accompany that sensation is another which is an omnipresent sensuality resonating from the soft curvature of textiles.

Within this exhibition there appears to be a new kind of Japanese Romanticism, lets say a heroic aesthetic is now being constructed, that stands against the tide of tedious consummation of art products, were any kind of greed in art is good and it's not, for here it appears is the right antithesis.

So if your in Motomachi Kobe please go and see this most interesting exhibition.

Corot - Souvenirs et Variations - Kobe City Museum

2008-10-23T04:11:00.000-07:00

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot

This is a great Corot show from beginning to end, amazing in the scope of paintings exhibited, which reveal his painterly influence not only to the current audiences within Japan but on the French Impressionist and moving onto Picasso, till now. Being able to study Corot's paint traces so closely with a relatively mild week day Kobe crowd within the gallery was a bonus, and one stands in line behind many a great master in this research and it's a humbling experience when one see what they've accomplish from such study.

This research of Corot's painting praixs was done by none other than Monet, Renior, Sisley, Derain and Maurice Dennis to enhance their own unique systems of painting. Study of the master artworks appears to to be something of a by gone era nowadays, but that is worse of for artists who don't, for the research praxis on show here is a rare opportunity, even more so in Australia.

The Corot exhibition is as good as it gets in direct painterly observations from ones picture plane in the landscape, then and now. Corot's accelerated learning curve starts when he researches painting in Italy whilst under the influence of the Italian artist Pierre Henri Valenciennes, whose image is also within this show but nowhere near as competently constructed as Corot' s images.

Pierre Henri Valenciennes expands on his landscape painting theory, (which was a loose for runner fore Impressionist idea) in this statement:

the painter must observe an expanse of country dominated by an area of sky and seen in the light that falls on it at the exact moment when the painter sets out to capture the scene

When Corot bought these landscape painting theories back from Italy to France, he shared them to other pre Impressionists and later the Impressionists. The name Impressionists was a constructed from Monet's painting Impression Sunrise c. 1874 and was conveyed upon the a whole group of artists exhibiting very differing concerns in painting from their early group shows in Paris in the 1870's.

Painterly research might be considered to be a study into the ripple effects from discoveries of the moment and not contracting to the moment as some sort of product based new art. Corot's spontaneity within his praxis in the landscape shifted painting from the studio to natural surrounds, as place of research and the results as evidenced in this show are so fresh, as if just past the now of the applied trace and this was expanded on by the Impressionists in very idiosyncratic ways.

Diana's Bath

Jean Baptiste Camille Corot

This freshness of Corot's paint traces is a revealing visual experience, the thin under painting with thickish oil traces being competently overlayed on other remembrances is impressive. And the progression of Corot's brush marks as they appear on the canvas, through time and delay as he matures, exhibits a growing understanding of a calligraphic vision, almost as though he is on auto pilot, armed with a store house of painterly memories to integrate into his system of painting as he realises from his praxis concerns when sighting the landscape.

Whilst looking at the old pictures of Corot above, it brings into focus an issue about fine art and photography. Photographic images appear to age very quickly, they don't contain the energy of the human traces as oil or pencils marks seem to contain, as witnessed in this show. And maybe at the moment or forever more there is some things technology might not be able to do. This is an exceptional exhibition and well worthy of going to twice.

Martin Heine - Gallery East - North Fremantle - Western Australia

2008-10-15T16:51:00.000-07:00

International Artist Martin Heine

Sometimes, of course, the consequence was that life and art, emotional existence and aesthetic practice came into conflict

Francis Bacon - English Painter

Few artists in Western Australia present good solo exhibitions internationally, Martin Heine is one such artist. Heine's painting praxis is extreme and can be likened to the English painter Francis Bacon. Similarly to Bacon but differently, Heine has successfully constructed images on the backside of the stretched fly wire meshed canvas, he then proceeds to push the coloured plastics through wire mesh, towards an image he cannot see, this is a most interesting painterly process which is highly unique, because there is no instant gratification of seeing the plastic traces as they're created, that are laden with delay, when the paint marks are finally sighted they contain all the memories of life, which interject daily consciousness.

Everything I want to painting must be consciously inverted

Martin Heine

Painitng by Martin Heine

This type of painting praxis by Heine will not work unless he constructs a terrain, that allows him forge a completely different synthesis in painting, which is why he has inverted the traditional canvas one renders plastic traces on and paints through the meshes porous surface to the other side. There is within this exhibition of paintings, the evidence of a highly original synthesis of image making, which exhibits itself as raw, direct sensations, laced with remembrances from other times. This current unique praxis by Heine makes him all the more significant as an international painter, for he transgressed Bacon's painting methodology in an original way.

For example; in the above painting Heine has pushed and manipulated his ideas in paint through the mesh, leaving his aesthetics desires waiting for him on the other side, this builds the influence of suspense through the delay of sighting the image, either it will succeed or fail, this is akin to some sort praxis sadomasochism. For painting is a sexy thing to do and if the media he uses in creating an image is sensual (which it is being running, wet, moist, slippery plastics), then the application of it onto and through a wire mesh by scrapping, pushing and swiping constructs its own violence upon the paints sensuality manifesting a sensually strange image

Such good painting with complex ideas in Perth is not that common, so why does Heine reside and paint in Perth? The answer could be this - Heine's lifestyle as an international artist reminds one of Marcel Proust’s the prisoner and the fugitive because of Perth's invisible seductive weft, which is something akin to an omnipresent cultural tedium that permeates a limited artistic terrain, like that cities ever present blue summer skies. Perth's an easy charming place to do painterly praxis, whilst enjoying the laid back city by the river, with pristine beaches, that can easily accommodate the intermittent cooling swim and this all tends to seduce and imprison ones senses into total aesthetic slumber, it like booking into the Hotel California to do painting. And maybe that's why Heines leaves for Germany so often, he doesn't want to suffocate in pleasant mediocrity.

Links to exhibition at Gallery East:

http://www.galleryeast.com.au/exhibit/current/main.htm

Kiyohara Takehiko, Mass of Light, Tor Road Gallery, Kobe, Japan

2008-10-04T15:31:00.000-07:00

Painting by Kiyohara Tahehiko

This is a strong show of competent painting and most enjoyable to engage, for it's about the densities of light in urban Japan as seen by the artist and painted from remembrances in the studio. It exhibits how light plays on the public surfaces of objects natural and made, it's also about planes, trains and very fast cars that are part of the unity and diversity of this very idiosyncratic country. This is one artist' s painted remembrances of Japan.

Painting by Kiyohara Tahehiko

Starting as the local airport there is several small savvy paintings, imbued with delicate oil traces of hues that shift the eye around the image, it's fine praxis and in some ways it reminds one of the Western Australian artist Joanna Lamb's imagery (but her surface qualities are not as interesting), whose attempts to paint airports (see link) are flat and echoing the tedium of Western Australian dullness. Kiyohara's painting on the other hand, resonate the ambiance of a living vital city along with all the amazing nuances and subtleties of light, that comes with it.

As one progresses up the stair case within the gallery there is further evidence of good painting on show and its not often within the many exhibitions visited, that the consistency of the artworks remains good throughout, whether the paintings are large or small but here in this exhibition, it seems normal.

For example, in this review within the top painting there is the interior of a railway carriage, it is empty as though it has pulled into the last train station at night or it's in a subway station, and the important factor within this image is that there is no natural light on or within the motif. But how Kiyohara has captured the densities of illumination throughout the train carriages is very accomplished through savvy applications of thinned paint, with an amazing array of liminal nuances. In focusing one's eyes to penetrate through the distant train carriage one notices condensed masses of light in a range of bluish, slightly yellowish, fat milky film hues, that are radiating from the subway carriage's light, it is clever painting.

Kiyohara's interest in the mass of light before ones optics has presented many optical spectacles of the most subtle kind within this show and with all the hype about how electronic visual technology has transgressed painting, here it seems is the proof, that it has not and further more, modern image making apparatus and their uses have a long way to go,to achieve the same liminal sensation in oily hues as evidensed in this show.

Joanna Lamb

http://www.johnstongallery.com.au/lamb%20joanna/lambairport08.html

Ayumi Shigematsu & Youko Inoue Shimada Galleries, Kobe, Japan

2008-10-01T13:10:00.000-07:00

Paintings by Youko Inoue

Memory is a curious phenomena when used within painting or any other art form and the reality is one cannot avoid using it within their praxis. The way memory reveals itself through artworks could only possibly described as arbitrary. For instance, why do some thoughts gravitate to the surface and become made traces in the public surfaces of the external world, while others reside in memory never to resurface again. At the moment no one is quite sure why memory operates this way but in time, somewhere a few centuries into the future, scientists will surely understand the modus operandi of the human mind. And then no doubt, control of how humans think will occur by someone or organisation or political ideology because control of thought is power and the corrupt it seems are always addicted to it, it's like money and if anything in recent weeks has taught us something it is that greed and control are always going to be with us.

Youko Inoue's passion is painting, this is so obvious in seeing this small documentary exhibition from a couple decades of praxis. Memory of places Youko has been seemed to have surfaces within the paintings, they're not of particular places but constructed memories from many places that sit within the canvas, as a cohesive synthesis.

For example, Youko being Japanese and living in Denmark creates an overlay of memories that now exhibited themselves as painted traces within the canvas, creating a cool landscape illuminated by a slightly warmer glow from the sun. Many of the paintings are without people but have large scale human endeavours within them, such as wind power farms jutting out from a flat lake or ocean, they remind one of Orson Wells, War of the Worlds with the large monsters moving in a distant horizon.

Others images by Youko are serenely peaceful and invite the viewer to seek solitude within them but this is only space within the mind, a memory, something that lets the brain relax even if for a short time, it's clever painting because just outside the door is very busy city, that rumbles through the day and into the night. One looks forward to the next decades of painting by Youko, it will surely be an interesting journey in painted memory.

Ceramics by Ayumi Shigematsu

The rock singer Leon Russell once sang; what a strange world we are living in and looking at the ceramics of Ayumi Shigematsu he may well have been right, for they affront ones senses straight away. There is within the ceramic objects a sensuality that fills the ambiance of the gallery, it's inescapable there is no where one can avoid that sensation, unless they decide to close their eyes.

Even though there is a sensuality resonating from the artworks, there is underlying sensation of menace, subtle at first but gravitates into ones memory whilst moving through the exhibition. Why the artist has created this menace, attached to such sensuous ceramic objects is a mystery but so is memory. For all the sensuality that oozes and radiates out into gallery from Shigematsu ceramics, there is this other, being an omnipresent confrontation upon ones sensation in the now, a kind of duality of pleasure and pain as gazes at the artworks

But maybe that's the nature of life, with comfort there is pain, nothing is absolute, being happy all the time isn't not going to happen, memory will find a way to install pain into your sensations and in as much as one found Ayumi's ceramic deliciously sensual, the obvious memories of pain surface unexpectedly making this sensory engagement with these ceramics an odd phenomena. So if your in Kobe take a short walk up from JR Saynommia and enjoy the show.

Artists and the Stock Market Crash

2008-09-29T20:56:00.000-07:00

Artists will survive

that same way when it was called the good times.

Travelling in the outback of Western Australia and hearing the news of the stock market crash, it occurred to me that nothing was really going to change that much in my life as an artist. Why? Well for the past thirty years money was never plentiful, but that the life of an artist.

Recession is when a neighbor loses his job. Depression is when you lose yours.

Ronald Reagan

To put it bluntly, there has never any flashy cars or even a house, nor expensive meals, painting was the only thing that was important and still is and even if one cant afford paints, there is always a pencil, biro and paper, so that's life as an artist, pretty much the same, praxis to ideas, that's how it is now and for the forseeable future.

For the time being the selling of artworks is pretty much not going to happen but this will sort out who is going to be an artist and who isnt, recessions tend to do this and that is a good thing to happen, the hangers on and art's carpet baggers will have to move on to survive, for they will not have the passion for it.

Western Australia is a little bit luckier than most there is a mining/energy boom, both are natural resources and plentiful within that state (even if the gas pipleline blows up), so there should be at least some spare cash floating round.

Unfortuantely, in recent times the art ministers of that state have done just about nothing for the fine arts, so that is why they are no longer in office, the public aren't that stupid, there was plenty of money and zero to be done seemingly became the objective for the fine arts, there is a now a new minister lets hope he at least does slightly better than the last, which wouldn't be hard.

So for the artists nothing has changed socially or personally, the struggle continues as it should and at the end of nearly thirty years as painter, I would never trade the experince for the high life, it has been too interesting and continues to be.

Jeff Mincham and Pippin Drysdale - Perth Galleries - Western Australia

2008-09-23T05:49:00.000-07:00

'Feathered Edge’

Size: 24 x 34 cms

Medium: scgraffito through glaze, multiglaze

Jeff Mincham ceramics at Perth Galleries are world class. For having resided for several years in Japan now, ones visual contact with the many, many ceramic artworks on show by artists living and dead in major museums and galleries has been extensive, which has left an impression on one's memory of what is quality and what has some way to go.

There is little doubt that Mincham has joined an elite group of ceramicists now, there is no offical recognition of them, other than when these artists see anothers artworks, they know that this artist is on a very similar level of praxis. In saying that there is resonating through the gallery a sensation that many of the best artists have within their praxis, a nagging doubt that something is not quite right, and Minchams artworks appear to have this Japanese quality of never attaining perfection even though there is aesthetically stunning ceramics that fill the room with a kind of awe, its impressive.

'A Grey Dawn ’ 2008

Size: 22 x 52 x 13 cms Medium: multiglazed and multifired

It's not often in Perth such artists like Mincham frequent this most isolated city accompamied with a stunning qarray of ceramic artworks as seen in the photograph above, it was a tactile and visual pleasure to slowly move through Minchams ceramics, and the artworks seemed to magnetise ones vision with prussian black glazes, light raw umber unglazed ceramic areas, seducing the eye to enquire more, through the interplay of subtle shifts of texture and hues, it is sensational praxis on show.

Light as seen by the eye within the public surfaces of the landscape, along with there subsequent hues through time is no doubt where Mincham gets his ideas from for the ceramics. Time and light are not new ideas in art as evidence in the previous blog on Monet but here Mincham brings a very idiosyncratic attitude in presenting them on clay, with the subsequent textile memories and this is not an easy synthesis in clay to do, for bringing differing memories through time to together with delay and influence is hard to arrange into an aesthetic that's for sure but Mincham has achieved it well and its a great show.

'Tanami Traces Series VI'’ 2008

Size: variable Medium: porcelain vessel

Nearby is Pippin Drysdale's ceramics her works are competent and well constructed but juxtaposed Minchams there tends to be something edgy missing, maybe they're so well constructed as an aesthetic with ideas drawn from a distant desert, that there is a visual comfort zone resonating within the space and that such remote landscape doesn't allow such luxuries and maybe that's the issue that needs addressing.

The Australian desert is hard place to be even when its climate is comfortable for white people, the colours are intense with light and shade changing through time, it's gritty, the sand gets into everything, there is not polish or lustre there, it is the remote, laden with the cruelty of sameness on its horizon. But it's a nice place for a short holiday, a tourist trip until one returns to the leafy green abodes of the studio on the southern parts of Australia's thin green coastline.

Maybe Drysdale needs to reside in summer within the desert to get the full blast of the furnace like heat that forges her colours, there is no doubt if she did this issues within her ceramics would change for nobody comes back the same from that experience its brutally hard.

This exhibition at Perth Galleries is a good show so try to make it.

The World of Claude Monet - Nagoya Boston Museum of Fine Arts - Nagoya - Japan

2008-09-10T23:20:00.000-07:00

Exhibition Catalogue

The Nagoya Boston Museum of Fine Art seems to always put on very interesting exhibitions and this one is no exception, that's for sure, for there is Monet who is a very special kind of painter, Degas, Pissaro, Sisely and two stunning paintings by Cezanne from the western aesthetic side of the exhibition.

Then there is the equally as important images being the original Ukiyo-e prints of Hiroshigie that influenced Monet and if western industrially made oil paints were partially responsible for modernism in painting, then the woodblock prints was one of the main engine rooms of ideas for paintings modernism as evident in this show.

In terms of painted surfaces Monet was a grand experimenter and a highly successful one if these images on show are anything to go by and there is nothing more pleasurable than sitting in a near empty room with an old art school friend from Perth Western Australia and enjoying some of the worlds best paintings. Monet's effect series painted on the River Seine are just stunning artworks and to scrutinize the paint surfaces, to see how he attained his ideas is a pleasure, and how radical the oil traces are today as if they've travelled time and space, its like looking at memory seemingly locked in observable time travel in the now, it's a pure treat.

Not far away is a Cezanne, actually there is two in this show, one that contains the collard system of painting and another a more mature self portrait of grumpy, theoretical determinist, and even if he was right about his own theory in painting, he was wrong in how he spoke of Gauguin's imagery in how he sort out a kind of primitive motifs to glean knowledge from and to use it within his own painted subject matter.

Then there is two stunning Degas artworks one from his race horse series, that looks so easily constructed but X ray analysis reveals he actually took some considerable time, to construct the painting shifting riders and horses into different postions within his canvas, to exhibit his own aesthetic taste. Further along there is a largish drawing of from the ballet series, that is dense with the low light one encounters in the halls off the main dance stage, it is like one was standing behind Degas as he constructed the drawing.

Exhibitions like this one at the Nagoya Boston Museum are rare and this is a stunning exhibition, wonderful in its recognition of how the Japanese artists through the wood block printing praxis help construct modernism in western painting

Permenant collection- Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Art - Kobe - Japan

2008-09-02T16:25:00.000-07:00

Permanent display exhibition pamphlet

It should be mentioned how wonderful the Hyogo Prefecture museums changing permanent collection is for there are some really stunning big and small artworks, and the curation is so savvy it tends to bring surprise and wonderment for all who venture into such a space, which that tends to be devoid of all the current trends in the marketing art galleries, as a kind of corporate brand label, and gosh the Japanese have a truly unique way of doing things.

Within the permanent collection there is a recent acquisition of Tamura Konosuke 1903 - 1986, titled; Summer 1942, oil on canvas (see image above on prefectural museum pamphlet), it has the motif of a Japanese lady with a very Parisian sensation resonating from it, something akin to Henri Matisse's style of imaging making. There is nothing new about gleaning certain painterly traits from another artist Picasso was a master of it, and here Konosuke has integrated French modern painting with Japanese idiosyncratic memories and the image is has many subtle nuances of hue, that reveal themselves after careful scrutiny of the painting.

Within this room there is also many other fine artworks, plus an area that reveals the process of conservation within a painting which is very informative to the public, for it brings part of the unseen process of running a major museum to the populations attention.

In the next room there is three stunning wood block prints, they're breathtaking, wonderful in every sense of the word. Kobayashi Kiyochika 1847 -1915 Great Fire of Ryogoku, Viewed from Hamacho 1881, records the events of one of Japanese seemingly never ending regular natural disasters ,whether that be from fire, flood, typhoon or earthquake. Koyabshi's image show intesity of of the blaze through savvy use of colour which is very cleverly applied. Not far away is another print by Kawase Hasui 1883 - 1959, Osaka Tenoji 1927 woodblock print and this is a stunningly beautiful print, its equal artwork may well be from the best images of European romantic landscape imagery. In observing this image one may wish that they could do as Hasui has achieved here in this print, it truly is a breathtaking image but I doubt many artists could come close.

The more one walks through the histories of art making in Japan, to its final standpoint (the finished image) as evidenced on these walls iwithn this very young museum (nearly 40 years ), there is the proof that art is young, because time is very old and if you wish to see the evidence of this come to Japan or just look out your window to the stars, and for god sake don't listen to those academics that say its all been done before, because it has not, time and light keeps moving into changing vistas.

Small Works - Gallery Shimada - Kobe - Japan

2008-07-31T16:06:00.000-07:00

Some of the artworks on show

This event of exhibiting small artworks happens once a year at Gallery Shimada and it is always worth visiting, to see what kind praxis has been happening within this particular artistic terrain of Japan. Also on exhibit there is some older artworks from aprior decades which makes for curious viewing in styles of art from other periods, thus resonating a ambience of something akin to browsing through treasure trove of idiosyncratic aesthetics.

The idea to exhibit small artworks is very appealling because in this day and age of large objects in art, that are almost mass produced, appear to manifest a kind of weft of viewer scepticism in how well constructed they are because any painting, print or sculpture, no matter what size is hard to make, that's the way good art is, just hard to make, nothing of quality comes easy or as it seems quickly. And in seeing these smaller works there is a sense that the system to make the artwork has been competently handled in the praxis.

One of the wonderful things about a museum is how you're jolted into confronting art from strange and wonderful civilizations and you look and learn and expand your horizons.

Sister Wendy Beckett - Writer on Art

Gallery Shimada may not be a museum but the way the show presents itself, leads the audience into inquiry, dialogue and curiosity, this is a delightful ambiance to have in a gallery, for it allows one to learn something about the art.

Not be fluent in Japanese or understanding the written language does not matter, art has its own universal way of communicating with the audiences and in this show certain artworks tend to contain some extraordinarily savvy universal signifiers, that are not just seen in the representational imagery but somehow resonate from the surface qualities as well, which may well tend to make any race on this earth stop in their tracks and take notice of it should they venture into the gallery. Good art is like that it makes you look at it and there is an abundance of it on the walls on show here now.

There is also a small box on the table and from what one understands the audience can put their preferance in for the artworks they repsonded to the most, so if your Kobe, please take a short walk up from JR Saynomia to Gallery Shimada and see this most interesting exhibition.

Joerg Lehmann - Fine Art Photography- Gallery Yamaki - Kobe

2008-07-21T15:32:00.000-07:00

Artwork by Joerg Lehmann

Good art often seems produced with the least amount of utensils, the painter might just use the tried and tested centuries old canvas, palette, oil paints, a drawing manifested with just water colour and pencil, performance with the human body being the apparatus to convey idea and here Lehmann use digital camera with tripod and no artificial light that technology can allow, to attain these nocturnal images of sculptures.

Blackness is the absence of illumination and within this sculptured terrain as evidenced in Lehmann artworks, there is enough light from near and distance sources, being the moon, stars or streetlight thus allowing these static motifs to be re-incarnated as photographic images, then to travel time and space through delay from the initial click of the digital camera, to resonate with the audiences in Japan in the now.

The now is important in Lehmann’s photography it’s the hit of the shutter, akin to a rite of passage for ancient and new memories of sculptured traces with current nocturnal lights, as the night overtakes the day. And this chaos of time and space between the idea (future image) click of the shutter (the now), and the photograph on the gallery wall (history) are really well portrayed in these images, it’s a visually seductive experience.

With all the myriad of household/urban electronic and digital imagery that mindlessly infiltrates ones senses as it transgress through the bowels of omnipresent capitalism, which continually seems to beam gnawing, lycra hues into the unconscious of their indifferent human receptors, it’s good to quietly meander around this exhibition by Lehmann whilst forensically examining the nuances of light, that illuminate the public surfaces of these sculptures within this seemingly quiet landscape.

The usage by the general populace of the digital photographic camera and its subsequent imagery nowadays is so common, that it is like breathing in and out, but here Lehmann holds his breath for as long as one can, to create a kind of unique tension of the moment in the present, it’s interesting image making that resides on the edge between what is hues of lightness and darkness.

So if in Kobe do go to Gallery Yamaki – Motomachi three and see this most interesting exhibition.

Haramiishi Kazuko Textiles and Performance – IchiGoya- Kobe

2008-07-19T15:16:00.000-07:00

Artwork by Haramishi Kazuko

Sometimes artists just use the whole world to investigate their ideas and integrate them into an aesthetic thread with no real beginning and finishes when the will of the body cannot create or the artist just decides that the thought or attitude is finished with, for the now.

In Kazuko’s case textiles is a passion and the journey to articulate her memories with it is in full swing. But what is so wonderful about it is Kazuko's in your face attitude, as evidenced by a spontaneous performance in this small space and in Australia terms, it’s about as big a middle class children’s bedroom but what a wonderment she has created.

Artwork by Haramishi Kazuko

Currently it appears performance art in Australia has been almost manicured into an industry (gosh Australian Art cultural officers love this crap word which seems to really stands for the death of fine art), and lacks the spontaneity of the moment. Against this manicured, sedated, auditioned, industry based art is Kazuko's sudden performance here who just grabbed a small personal map, hanging by a thread across this tiny room with an audience of four people, then proceeded to perform with an animation that there was one thousand people in front of her, it was a special moment.

The other issue that sprung to mind is her extreme usage of textiles, whatever the original function of the some of the objects, Kazuko had sown threads into them and shifted with her praxis influenced into the realm of fine art. What was so enjoyable about the artworks on show is that they weren’t placed under glass to look like some commercial manufacture but arranged to cause curiosity and inquiry.

Kazuko’s arrange of the artworks integrated with her performance and being so close to the audience, creates a clash of sensations, unavoidably in ones face, it’s as though personal space shrinks, the performer/viewers intertwine, so memory becomes integrated between what is outside sensorial remembrances being received and attaching themselves through delay to ones immediate memories/remembrances from personal histories, it’s an unusual experience to be had but that’s good performance for you, memorable!

If there is opportunity to see Kazuko’s artwork do visit Ichigoya:

http://ichigoya.daa.jp/

Three Keystones - Ashiya City Museum of Art and History

2008-07-14T16:35:00.000-07:00

Ashiya and Kobe Mountains

Art history is very important, it leaves the imprint of memory for future generations to either avoid or take up and do something else with it. Currently, at the Ashiya City Museum of Art and History there is an interesting exhibition about the idiosyncratic nature in the historical making of fine art from its local terrain.

The collection consists of three interesting keystones Koide Narashige and Shinobashi Western Art Research Centre Artists, Yoshihara, Jiro and the Gutai Art Association and Nakayama Iwata, Hanaya Kabei and Ashiya Camera Club.

On the ground floor there is the artworks of Kiode Narashige and the Shinobashi Western Art Research Centre Artists, what is intriguing about these images is the way a Japanese sensibility of painting is influenced by the western style, these painters were researching.

These overlays of eastern/western influences of remembrances and painting, creates a unique imagery that at times manifests an unusual sensation which resonates from the current artworks on show, especially Narashige nudes, they tend to exhibit what is understood to be western painting and what has historically already been installed as image making in the artist’s remembrances from his youth in Japan, for the undraped female he paints has this strange form to her figure, similar to classical Greek sculpture and yet she is at the same time observably Japanese.

The trend of influence of remembrances and western/eastern image making continues into the upstairs gallery were on exhibit is the artworks of Yoshihara Jiro and Gutai Art Association formed in the early nineteen fifties.

The Gutai group main manifesto was as Yoshihara’s advised "do not imitate others, and make what nobody knows", this is a nice sentiment but all fine art has a history and one suspects bringing the materiality of paint to life, has been around for a long time in Japan, even if it is sumi-e, it does not matter, for in traces left by the human manipulation of a calligraphy brush, as evidenced through the centuries in Japan resonates an aesthetic life in itself, as well as language, even if one just decides to look at the written word and this in its own way seems a precursor to Gutai.

Nonetheless the Gutai movement is really wonderful in this exhibition as a kind of representation of the Japanese avant garde of its day.

Aesthetically, whether all the artworks on show could be classed as either good or bad, doesn’t matter, the interest in the exhibition is the energy of the painted information because the avant garde is not about good painting, it’s about ideas and good painting is about creating imagery that is just awe inspiring, like William Turner or Rembrandt it’s a different idea, one is not better than the other, they are what they are art that is interesting and here is the Nippon avant garde.

Lastly, but not least is the Ashiya Camera Club founded by Iwata Nakayama and this exhibition contains much nostalgia about modernist ideas in photography in Japan from the 1930’s till now. The Ashiya Camera Club was also not so much about the motif but how the construction of the subject matter was made through innovative techniques, such as placing objects directly onto the photographic paper, which makes this exhibit so interesting.

All three exhibitions on show at the moment give a fascinating insight onto Japanese modern art movements and it is well worth spending some considerable time wandering through the galleries, good art history is always well worth studying and this show is no exception.

Mayumi TERADA Fine Art Photographer - Gallery Yamaki - Kobe - Japan

2008-07-04T00:24:00.000-07:00

This is a very good exhibition not only for the way the photography has been presented but also it represents the most universal of ideas, in the most pedestrian way possible being those none elaborate vistas that one sees everyday in their own abodes. The idea that resonates from these artworks by Terada is that space between consumption and life.

We exist in life with many forms of personal consumption, whether it be oxygen, food, liquids, clothing or the very worst crap capitalism can make us believe that is necessary to have fulfilled lives with. The intermediate space between life and consumption is neatly portrayed here in part by Terada and hers is a kind melancholy about the absence of things she might desire and one of them is love, in whatever form that may take.

People who live in society have learned how to see themselves in mirrors as they appear to their friends.

Paul Jean Sartre - Nausea

Terada' s sparse interiors are laden with the Renaissance painting technique of chiaroscuro that in its own way, through her use of photography, animates the presence of a personal invisible void in life, with only suggestive traces left behind to hint at this, like the ruffled bed linen or the singular dinner piece sitting on the table, giving hint to such existentialist melancholy that permeates these images allowing the viewer to share such sentiments upon gazing at the imagery.

The other issue that raises itself within Terada images is the way the bright light interplays within the image, suggesting the person has vacated from the image or entering into it, creating a sense of suspense but with no real answer to found now, maybe in another exhibition. Whatever the Terada decides to do with the possibilities, it will surely be worth going to see. So if your in Kobe go and see this most interesting exhibition on show in Motomachi.

The Yatate (portable writing implement)Tawara Art Museum Foundation - Ashiya - Hyogo - Japan

2008-06-22T04:34:00.000-07:00

As far as small museums go for quality and quantity in information, The Tawara Art Museum is stunning, especially with this current exhibit of portable writing implements, gosh it's a knockout exhibition. It is especially refreshing against all the current conceptualised art disasters that universally litter the planet like doggy do's, amongst the very few good ones, for here is where an idea created through praxis is really in sync with the object, it's delightful to experience.

What is so wonderful about this small museum, (about the size of a middle class house in Australia) is the amazing array of designs on the writing implements, it's breathtaking and most of the three dimensional constructions are inspired by nature.

In the short but informative catalogue by Shoichi Tawara; The Yatate was used by cultured Japanese until the invention of the fountain pen, even the Samurai carried it into battle. The origins of Yatate started around the 1185-1333 in the Kamakura Period and finished towards the end of the Edo Period (please see link at the bottom of the page). But what really amazed one at this small museum was the way the whole exhibition was curated to represent a kind of installation with samurai handle designs, sumi-e, ukiyo-e, ceramics that women used to pour oil in to comb their hair and Yatate, presenting a curious journey that could be enjoyed from beginning to end.

The museum with its cross fertilisation of ideas from the differing epochs of art objects on exhibit made one start thinking about how art schools operate nowadays, that seem smothered with the mission creep on the students synthesis through academic territoriality, that is so evident within them. Erected walls have replaced spaces were students could walk through and glean ideas from another's praxis, the is unlie when Picasso walked through the Louvre devouring everthing in sight.

Mostly, it seems, these walls have been erected by the institutions staff to strengthen their positions but this will never be the case, and from the evidence seen so far, its been a complete failure for the synthesis and praxis of the student to learn something. If there was ever an illustration for art schools to all work under one roof and in a big hall to learn off one another, this museum was it, the centuries of artworks that had inspired by other artistic disciplines to reach a high idiosyncratic aesthetic was laid out for all to see.

It is in exhibitions such as this were many of the fine art disciplines of Japan are exhibited together, that one soon realises that the idea of modernism is tenuous, in the sense, that none of these objects have lost their modernity since the day of creation. They 're as modern then, as they are now and even though in the case of the Yatate, the technology of the fountain pen has lead to its demise, the artwork of Hokusai (image below) stands as first hand evidence against the fact that recent technology produces more modern artworks. This is a great exhibition small but savvy.

The Yatate Link

http://www.stutler.cc/pens/yatate/yatate.html

Hirokuni Takeuchi - Talk is Cheap & Tetsuo Hayashi Istanbul, Bologna and Paris Gallery Shimada - Kobe

2008-06-12T17:39:00.000-07:00

Hirokuni Takeuchi's Talk is Cheap

Both these exhibitions are good and Takeuchi's is really in your face in many ways due to the way he has portrayed cleverly within these artworks, the millions of neon signs that constantly bombard the senses here in Japan. Takeuchi's smaller artworks on paper are the strongest, there immediate, directly drawn sensations from remembrances of what has been sighted in signage within inner city densely populated urban Japan.

For instance, there is a drawn for sale discount sign amongst the myriad of others, on what looks like a sex shop, with a kind of manga sexy girl with legs parted, and not being used to seeing discount sex for sale its unnerving, although one is far more comfortable with signs that display marked downed electronic gear, books, cars, clothes and food it's is a very in your face part of the image.

This leaves one thinking about capitalism or lets say economics which has no morality, it simply a way of measuring wealth, and specifically how countries acquire this, it seems doesn't really matter, for nowadays there is the developing system of doing business with tyrants, no matter how obscene or brutal they're to their own people.

There is many other well constructed images within this exhibition, the smaller ones are savvy and Takeuchi's sensibility to the drawn medium is so obvious, they resonate out from the walls like embedded, framed, neon jewels but laced with the irony of signage, which makes them critical artworks in the sense they can allure the audience, to be confronted with signs of mostly useless information one doesn't need in their life. How many times does one buy things that may seem necessary at the time but soon realise what a useless object it turned out to be.

But as the Noble Prize winner Bertrand Russell once said; There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge, and one has to admit many of the useless signs whilst walking around Kobe have created much mirth, as has this most interesting exhibition.

Painting by Tetsuo Hayashi

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Marcel Proust

There is in within the art world two important movements happening now, one being the avant garde and the other good painting. This show by Tetsuo Hayashi falls into the latter for these painted images of old European buildings are so interestingly created through freshly painted remembrances from vision (memory)

Hayashi has mapped an some kind painted chart of what he has desired to paint which is of lived in buildings, he didn't go for the marvels of European building design but the simple charm of those old idiosyncratic dwellings, that the urban populations have resided in for centuries. Each building within this exhibitions contain the traces of humanity from the many residences through the centuries and each painting resonates a kind of passage of time, through the textures applied in oil paint.

But beyond these well painted images by Hayashi there has been also achieved, a kind of existentialism within each artwork, so not only does one gaze at the surface textures within these paintings to sense the passage of time, but there is also a kind sensation of what has happened behind the walls of these old buildings within each epoch of habitation and that is a very strange feeling to achieve in image making. For to achieve the presence in the transparency of space between two objects is difficult but Hayashi has achieved it here, like Alfred Hitchcock did in his movies.

Which stands testament to what a wonderful painting exhibition this is for not only does Hayashi animate the passages of time, through rendering the humanity of its traces on the walls of these old buildings in paint marks but he animates the void of times lived between them. leaving one with many mysterious sensations, so if your in Kobe to take a short walk from JR Saynomia to Gallery Shimada and see this two good exhibitions on show now.

Stiff Cheese Hot Press Release, Book Launch: CODES The art of Janis Nedlela 1982 - 2007 by David Bromfield

2008-06-12T03:32:00.000-07:00

CODES The art of Janis Nedlela 1982 - 2007

David Bromfield
Western Australia's leading independent critical fine arts writer

'will be available at Planet Books and at gorepani gallery Albany after the launch'

Planet Books

(see link below)

So if your in Perth bust your boredom and have a read.

CODES or how to make art in Perth without becoming completely bored

Nothing that I did was serious. Everything I do is fun . . .I was never frustrated, never anti or angry or anything.

Janis Nedēla interview with David Bromfield. March 16 2006.

David Bromfield’s full length, full colour study of the art of Janis Nedēla will be formally launched in early 2008.

This absorbing account is the result of an intense collaboration between artist and author, involving hundreds of hours of interviews and painstaking reconstructions. Nedēla himself designed the book, once again in close collaboration with the author. The result is an absorbing, often surprising account of the work of an artist whose primary artistic aim has been to have fun. Not that having fun requires an inoffensive, inconsequential art.

Bromfield shows that from the beginning Nedēla was determined to take his art seriously and that, in dull pompous old Perth, the only way to do that was to have fun.He traces the evolution of Nedēla’s method, which the artist refers to as ‘coding’ from the reconstructed colour coded novels of his schooldays through collage, letraset and thousands of ‘adjusted’ pages of text and reassigned books to pencils painting and finally to performance. Nedēla’s ‘Coding’ began with the substitution of colours for letters and words. With a little help from John Cage, and others, it went on to become a universal method of fortuitous transposition. Texts become arrays of coloured pencils. Handwriting becomes painting.

Planet Books, link here;http://www.planetvideo.com.au/library/books/

Many thanks to Stiff Cheese for the information and the Kurb Gallery for allowing the reproduction of the image.

Sakabe Takayoshi Painitng - Ashiya Kakimoto Clinic - Ashiya - Japan

2008-06-09T07:17:00.000-07:00

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Benard Shaw

Walking around Ashiya in the rainy season is a relaxing thing to do especially if you have been to the dentist, it's a nice place situated between the mountains and the sea of Kobe. It's also pleasant to study the idiosyncratic gardens that adorn the many smallish apartments and houses that line the narrow streets. These household garden aesthetics created by the locals present a living exhibition/installation for the neighbourhood audience to visually engage on a daily basis.

The aesthetics people try to forge in this densely populated part of Japan is so interesting to view from street to street, for in one road it may well be the way a small garden is portrayed amongst the apartments which lets the eye relax and take in a pleasant visual memory or maybe its just one bamboo plant in a ceramic pot that has grown against a grey cement wall, adorned with intemittent moss outcrops or how Ikabana (flower arrangement) is arranged with an glass case that one sees in the many train stations dotting the landscape of Hyogo.

In walking back to the train station and out of the corner of ones eye in the foyer of this building (some kind of medical clinic as now informed, thought there was an art gallery upstairs actually ) there was this really enjoyable visual sensation to be had of an Ikibana arrangement in front of this very good painting by Sakabe Takayoshi.

And strangely enough they both tended to amplify the sensations of the presence of nature in against what one might generally suggest is the omni present sterility of a medical clinic the world over. Takayoshi's painting had these wonderful painterly surface qaulities and the motif tended to evolve from the traditions of sumi-e scroll painting but in a very unique way, for he had transgressed the boundaries of a Nihongo painting and brought into this current image a European sensibility of painting.

Takayoshi has spent many years in Europe and is apparently still there, thus through his study of European masters as well as the Japanese master painters, he has created this large painting of what one tends to see in the Japanese mountainous riverscapes and it appears he has just focused and amplified one small corner of that world so well, its a joy to study the painting.

And in its own way this is what painting is about to bringing a memory to the audience, that they would not necessarily receive in this heavily urbanised terrain, it creates presence in their remembrance, and if the painting was not in that foyer, there is no doubt local population would be lesser for it, as it animates the void that cement buildings often leave one with. So this strange installation of Ikabana and painting was a real pleasure to investigate, one must also thank the kind lady who informed me in fluent English of the artist and that kind of general information is always treat to have in Japan for allows credit to the artist.

Shimokura Tae and Okatamoto Mitsuhiro - Gallery - Haneusagi - Kyoto - Japan

2008-06-07T04:58:00.000-07:00

Shimokura Tae - Installation

Japan must be one of the most underrated fine art centers in the world, there is not one shred of doubt in my mind. In venturing into the many galleries in Japan, there is mostly on show very high quality praxis that equals the intentionality of ideas as seen in the drawings, sculpture or installations. The lifestyle of Japanese artists is one of real commitment with little or no lifetime finacial reward for the effort, they have just applied themsleves to their praxis and it shows, which really makes one think, just how committed and wonderful as artists they are, it's a humbling experience.

By comparison Australian artists seem so very spoilt, its not funny ( they appear to want big houses, lifestyle and studios mostly, whether this is a good thing or bad thing, is yet to be decided. But there is sneaking suspicion, it is bad in comparison to what is happening in Japan now. And here in Nippon it seems fine art is not not about the British/Eurocentric money ego trip, it's about fine art, with good ideas and this show by Shimokura and Mitsuhiro is not only interesting but the craft of the installation is intelligently made, making it a pleasure to engage.

Okatamoto Mitsuhiro - Installation

In walking into gallery a hose was laid out over the floor, attached to a tap and it looks as though they're cleaning the first gallery, so careful steps were being made to avoid any mess which couldn't be seen. Suddenly, at the end of end of the hose (see Shimokura's photograph) water came spilling out in the shape of a spillage. But the water had florescent sensation which one soon realised was from an over head projection, it was a short but savvy installation and immensely likeable.

More often than not film and installation is dull or cliched in Australia but this particular piece by Shimokura is an unnerving, yet surprising because as soon as one enters the gallery, there is the expectation of cleaning and not art happening, Shimokura's ability to subtly deconstruct the space as a non event for the audience, then cleverly bring it to its purpose, that being a contemporary art space reveals a very well thought out piece of deception, like the historical Ukiyo-e artists had used in well known public signifiers to get around Edo censors.

In the next gallery is Okatamoto's artworks and its good to see an artist who still interested in art and politics, because they rarely separate in art and life, as recently exmapled in the media saga of the Australian artists Bill Henson's photography of a nude girl, which the Prime Minister called "disgusting". Prime Minister Rudd will surely have left one of those iconic art phases sad for him.

But nonetheless, here in this show Okatamoto's artwork takes on this Eurocentirc politically ironic behavior through his Euro coin installation. Its a clever piece of art constructed out of a supposive united European currency that are embossed with heavily nationalistic images in the middle of them from associated countries, all one can say to that is, it sounds like unity and nationalistic diversity is like a bad marriage of economic convenience, heading for an even worse case in the international divorce courts sooner or later.

Another interesting piece is the police car tarpaulin, that laces up from behind on the boot of the car, this is similar to the Japanese wrestler politician who wears a mask. The police artworks was then taken and placed over a car in a street. The installation photograph of the car draped with the police tarpaulin in the street is priceless and most enjoyable to see, it looks authentic from a distance but it the takes on a kind of interactive piece of art, due to the signifier of the police car, one only wishes to have had a camera running to capture the expressions on the audiences as the engaged the police car artwork.

This is a very good art show and if your in Kyoto, please go to Gallery Haneusagi it will be well worth your while.

Link to Gallery Haneusagi:

http://www.haneusa.com/top.html

Yamaguchi Makio - Chung Sang Hwa Gallery K.A.I - Kobe - Japan

2008-05-31T04:26:00.001-07:00

Gallery K.A.I. constantly puts on interesting exhibitions and this one is no exception. The two artists on show are Yamaguchi Makio and Chung Sang Hwa from Korea and it’s about how materials through manipulation in praxis and realization become an object of personal aesthetic.

Within the exhibition there is several of Yamaguchi's stone sculptures that are carved, chiseled and grinded, which begs one almost to touch them for they contain a myriad of sensations, not only visually but when caressed and this is what makes his artworks in their own way mysteriously sexy. Yes, almost all art has some kind of sexiness attached to the making.

Although, extreme rampant feminism has tried to obliterate the art and sex idea off the face of the art world through introducing some dull kind of political correctness into the making of artworks because they appear to believe in some ways the naked female form, when subjected to the male gaze is a kind of rape. Well does that mean when one looks at the image of a speeding car it amounts to being violated by road rager or still life with a sumptuous dinner one violates the poor? I don't think so but sadly many people have fallen for it and art history is almost a thing of the past to study. Which is more or less why so much bad art is made nowadays but not at this exhibition and when I do see it wont be reviewed on this blog.

Both artists on exhibit here displaya fantastic sensibility towards them materials they use, for example； Sang Hwa paintings through the paint application in light yellowish, whitish, greys are really sensuously applied in a very clever manner, it’s a joy to see the paint thick, thin, scraped thoughtfully in slantwise directions and then gently caressed across the canvas again in other directions. Sung Hwa artworks are a visual pleasure to engage.

Makio's stone sculptures are in some areas smooth, heavily grated or chiseled they seduce the viewer to further inquiry due to the visual tension caused by the shape of them and what could be there wieght. Also it appears Makio's sculpture no matter what environment they were placed in would demand attention, not in a loud way but through the aesthetics they have been endowed with as evidenced by the artworks within this small gallery.

So if you’re in Motomachi - Kobe do go to K.A.I Gallery to see this most interesting exhibition.

Idiosyncratic Visions - Hiroko Takahama and Nobuko Hayashi - Australian National University - Foyer Gallery

2008-05-19T23:21:00.000-07:00

The Artists at the ANU School of Art

Australia suffers more than anything else within the art world the tyranny of distance, this is so obviously evidenced by the current exhibition at the Australian National Gallery, were the Turner to Monet exhibition is on show now and by the crowds that are currently flocking to see the exhibition there is a need for external visual stimuli to be comsumed by the local population.

Recently there was an interesting exhibition by Hiroko Takahama and Nobuko Hayashi two Japanese artists from Kobe at the Australian National University, School of Arts - Foyer Gallery and it presented interesting viewing, due to where their artworks had been created. being the highly populated, industrialized terrain of the Kansia area.

To live in this over crowded area of industrialised Japan and being an artist in not easy, one's own experience can testify to that experience. What is so unique to the Kobe area is that the fine art history is so old and this show held at the ANU was another small but interesting piece of the ever growing paradigm of its influence upon the western memory.

Artwork by Hiroko Takahama

Takahama uses postcards and with a stamp from her father's trading business placed on them, then with various mixed media is a drawn or painted memory, that has resonated from viewing the stamp motif is created on the post card. This creates some sort of fusion between history (viewed memory) and phantasma of what be out there as an image.

The variety of media and the passion that goes into creating these unique memories from a stamp on postcard makes fascinating viewing. Takahma's strange coloured raw marks, along with almost child like scrawled lines that cascade across the surface of the postcard, like unrestricted mercury as it hits the ground, along with random patterns, that exhibit some thought during the process of delay and influence of making art, that flows in and around the stamp engaging and disengaging, like a traveler coming and going from a destination. One soon realises the world is an amazing place when viewing exhibitions such as this one by Takahama.

What is also so interesting is just where the father has done trade within the world, and in viewing the myriad of different stamps Takahma has used within this exhibition, he has just about spanned all continents.

Artwork by Nobuko Hayashi

Nobuko Hayashi presents another idiosyncratic view of the world and how it is perceived through remembrances from her optical space in Kobe, which is one of much industry, throngs of people and crowded spaces, almost every minute of the day and night when she travels outside her house, which is situated between the limited space of the mountains and the sea of Hyogo Prefecture.

But in Hayashi's studio there is another terrain, that takes shape in the mind and through thought and action, it becomes as real, as the one she lives in on a daily basis, here she uses a small needle and arches paper, to peak or slightly open up smallish holes in the surface of the paper to create sensitive tensions of small undulations, on this very flat clean surface.

Hayashi's landscape is of no actual particular place but a collection of memories, congregated through remembrances, which now resonate with the audience, as the visually engage them. There is the familiar symbols of hills and mountains but that is about as far as it goes, after that the optical trek is yours and one has to make their own visual navigation through the paper reliefs, along with all the sensitive nuances of light that parade across the objects through time.

It is if Hayashi has let an imprint on paper for the audience to indulge themselves, with free memory into a journey of self discovery, which appears to be static as a the relief construction but the object catches lights time throughout the night and the day, shifting the experience of the motif continually and the visual memory.

TURNER TO MONET - the triumph of landscape painting - Australian National Gallery - Canberra - Australia

2008-05-15T21:49:00.000-07:00

Exhibition Catalogue - an informative easy read.

Having seen many, many world class international exhibitions that come to Japan's major museums of modern art regularly in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe from all around the world, one can only wish this show, that is currently on at the Australian National Gallery went there to, such is the amazing quantity and quality of artworks with its unique reference to Australian landscape painting.

There is no doubt in one's mind, that if such an ambitious project of exhibiting a similar idea in China, Japan and Korea of Australian landscape painting as successfully achieved by the Australian National Gallery now, along with the shows associated a priori histories in landscape painting from Europe and America, the benefits from the ripple effect by the East Asian audiences response to it, after seeing such alien terrain, that in many parts of Australia still exists, would be ongoing for many years to come in areas like education and cultural tourism.

The relevance of an Australian Landscape Painting exhibit touring East Aisa, can be evidenced in the relationship to modern painting by the impact of Claude Monet (who was very influenced by Japanese Ukiyo-e) had on the Australian painter John Russell, who painted alongside him in France and was there at the birth of modernism in painting as it happened .

In reference to this current exhibition one must congratulate the Director Mr Ron Radford and curatorial staff for a truly amazing show that consists of some of the worlds most radical landscape painters from any epoch. For example; Turner's painting Stormy Sea with blazing wreck c 1835-40 contains some extraordinarily radical paint traces, that almost rage across the canvas, thus resonating the sensation of menace, that ocean contains at the ready in its under belly, to surface at a moments notice to the unsuspecting seafarer.

John Constable's Brighton Beach c1824 tends to forge a new genre in western coastal image making as does Charles Conders painting Bronte Beach 1888 in the southern hemisphere. Constable's other paintings on show, exhibit some very radical paint traces and this is what becomes so obvious within this exhibition very quickly, that it is filled with artworks that are laden with idiosyncratic radical paint traces which renders unique visions in landscape painting.

And as one walks from room to room the paintings become more and more radical, as evidence in the artworks of Samuel Palmer, Casper David Friedrich, Camille Corot, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, Vincent Van Gogh to name a few, along with the Australian painters Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton who had to develop an almost completely new palate to deal with the unique Australian sunlight.

Radical image making in landscape painting through the application of extreme paint traces as achieved by these afore mentioned painters, just doesn't happen from birdsong academic painting education. Original images come into being from the artist's memory(vision), through the subsequent remembrances of thought, then into painterly action on canvas, coupled with reflections from studying the developing image, so they can shifts the painting system can happen towards making sure the intentions of the paint marks are in sync with the artist's idea about the motif.

And this is what is so unique about this exhibition, that the audience can experience the now in painting with the wear and tear of time and space on the oil traces as evidenced in the paint marks within these master artworks. These images on exhibit here by the masters in rendering the landscape motif contain the critical decisions in painting that created revolutionary landscape image making. The Turner to Monet exhibition is a show where one can do great deal of learning about paint traces that changed the terrain of western landscape painting forever.

So if your painter or young fine art student or just interested in the paintings as evidenced by the continuing large crowds visiting the Australian National Gallery now, then don't miss this exhibition, its one of the most informative exhibitions on Australian landscape painting this country has achieved so far.

Link to the Australian National Gallery:

http://www.nga.gov.au/Home/08-AUTUMN/

Cresside Collette - Drill Hall Gallery - ANU - Canberra - Australia

2008-05-11T07:25:00.000-07:00

Valley View Miniature woven Tapestry by Cresside Collette

Cresside Collette's exhibition at the Australian National Universities Drill Hall Gallery contains what must be some of this nations future, iconic, landscape tapestries. In entering the gallery space these small landscape artworks, resonated like jewels on the gallery walls. These images were created by Colette from her studio residency, which was spent at the Bundanon property, Shoalhaven that was bequested to the nation by the famous Australian Artist Arthur Boyd.

It's not often such savvy image making in any medium, creates a sensation, that captures ones attention so overwhelmingly but Collete has no doubt achieved this with these small landscape artworks. To generalise these artworks on show by Collete as simply tapestries in some way does not do the artworks, nor the artist any justice, they're more than that, especially the small woven images, for they contain a kind of phenomena of vision (memory) from remembrances of what the artist had sighted in Bundanon terrain. Especially the hues that are woven with kind of intimate sensibility that is rarely seen even in painting or drawing nowadays, its a real visual feast.

Collete's Amphitheatre tapestry reminds one of the Australian painter David Davies Templestow series, in how the hues have been weaved throughout this artwork, with a range of subtle light greys through to nocturnal dark blue grey mauve's, as the night takes over the day in the distance and it's stunning. In the fore ground of the tapestry, there is a range of light ochre reds, light greens, viridian tones, interspersed intelligently with blackish deep ultramarine tones, making the work almost sparkle on the gallery wall.

The tapestry River and Rocks contains an odd sensation of the viewer almost being on site, this sensation appears to be created by they way Collette has arranged the colours, for the audience to visually indulge in, it's a very fresh/immediate artwork, it is almost as if time and space had been collapsed into a singular moment, like Corot or Monet have achieved in there desire to capture it in oil from first hand account in painting in front of the motif.

Collete's larger landscape tapestries and drawings, do not appear to contain the same sensibility as the smaller artworks, this may well be because large objects cannot sparkle like jewels, which inevitable turn out to be rare, precious and small. Nonetheless, what is so like able about this exhibition is that the pedestrian Australian bush landscape, continues to be a motif that creates significant imagery as evidenced in this exhibition. And it appears that artists like Collette, continue to push the boundaries of Australian landscape image making outwards, into a seemingly never ending horizon.

Link to Drill Hall Gallery

http://info.anu.edu.au/mac/Drill_Hall_Gallery/

Prison Art Exhibition - Old Fremantle Prison - Western Austrlian

2008-05-08T19:03:00.000-07:00

Old Fremantle Prison - Western Australia

Reviewed by

Sly Cassey

The “Prison Art Exhibition” is now open at the old Fremantle Prison and the artworks on show were completed by artists from the Prison Education Centres. Much of the art produced within the Department of Corrective Services art program tends to be unseen by the general public but there is an opportunity now with this good quality show.

Not having been to any of the Department of Corrective Services Exhibitions before, one was not sure what to expect, so in seeing the artworks on show there was a pleasant surprise to be had, which also stands testament to the artists themselves and the dedication by the staff working in this area.

The artworks presented created an impressive show and worthy of making an effort to view, special mention is to made on the quality of some of the Indigenous paintings. Also within the exhibit there is some beautiful and well executed large abstract images, created with somewhat limited resources, and despite this some very competent artwork was produced.

The exhibition also offers a variety of interesting artworks created by a large selection of culturally diverse but talented artists, some examples of this can be evidenced in 3D sculptured images set out on glass tables.

The Department of Corrective Services staff have worked hard to reveal that education maintains a vital place within the corrective system and as evidenced by this exhibition its contribution to the culture of community at large is very positive.

So if your in the Fremantle make an effort to see this exhibition at this historic convict built prison it will be well worth your while.

Liz Truswell- Unearthing the Past: A Celebration - Goldfields Art Center - Kalgoorlie - Western Australia

2008-05-07T15:52:00.000-07:00

Sea Lily by Liz Truswell

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed."

Albert Einstein

Liz Truswell praxis reveals an aesthetic intersection where science and art meets as a drawn image. Truswell's scientific background is one of a palaeontologist and these particular artworks are based on creatures that existed some 200 million years ago, which in a strange way seems to support the idea of existentialism (the idea of possibilities) because of an odd feeling manifests itself whilst gazing at these ancient sea creatures, on the edge of the western desert in Australia

Truswell's drawings of these ancient sea creatures contain the mysteries of time and there is just enough information within them to let the viewer know that some life existed but what kind of life it was will more than likely never reveal itself. As things exist through time and delay creation of new visual sensations happen by the moment when encounted by human beings that is the inevitable phenomenon of memory and ongoing thought processes.

Ancient history only surrenders partial truths and within this exhibition Truswell slowly releases a little more forensic information with these competent drawings, it may well be an unexpected shaped she has seen, a texture that has not be recognized before and this is the most interesting aspect of this show, that the audience to may well discover visual wonders that they had not seen before. So in slowly moving around this exhibition whilst examining the artworks, the system used by Truswell is a visual pleasure to be studied, and if your in Kalgoorlie do go to this most interesting of exhibitions.

Further more The Goldfields Art Gallery is like cultural jewel in this vast land laden with gold and it time well spent visiting in this most idiosyncratic of Western Australian Towns and as the late Noel Sheridan once stated on visiting Kalgoorlie " one sort of swaths through history here".

Goldfields Art Gallery Link:

http://www.kalg.curtin.edu.au/gac/gallery.htm

Miho Kyotani - Afterimage - Gallery - Yamaki Fine Art - Kobe - Japan

2008-04-15T00:51:00.000-07:00

To be a surrealist means barring from your mind all remembrance of what you have seen, and being always on the lookout for what has never been.

Rene Magritte

Miho Kyotani has spent the last sixteen years working as an artist in Paris and again the surfaces qualities within this current painting reveals, the education she has received from living in one of the great cultural centers of the world has been more than fruitful.

The Afterimage of something seen resides in memory and how that exhibits itself through remembrances that are recalled back in the studio is little understood by science so far, but there is no doubt in the future, it will be. Artists, throughout history have exhibited afterimages (remembrances) through visual exhibition and it has been very diverse culturally as civilization has revealed. Kyotani's artworks within this exhibition successfully adds to this very strange mixture of memory and place in paintings history.

My first memory is of the brightness of light - light all around. I was sitting among pillows on a quilt on the ground - very large white pillows.

Georgia O'Keefe

And as one peers into the abyss of painted space within some of Kyotani's images, another culture forges itself into existence within ones remembrances as an Afterimage, which stems from the energy of visual recollections, emerging into consciousness about ones own beingness, with this vast cosmos. Former painting paradigms collapse and new frontier stretch out into once almost unthinkable fertile artistic terrains.

Artists have to progress, seek new frontiers, different systems of painting, there minds are not static, nor is human wonderment, nor is painting about illusion but seems about more about recording human experience from visual memory. And for the time being it seems memory is the first and final frontier if painting.

What the future may hold is almost unpredicatable from moment to moment, the now is all that we have and as one looks back on history through walking around this most interesting exhibition by Kyotani, there is many more questions being asked from what she has painted.

So if your in Motomachi Kobe please take time to see this most interesting exhibition.

Doumae Morito - Gallery Kitanozaka - Kobe - Japan

2008-03-30T01:33:00.001-07:00

Doumae Morito hails from Hokkaido Prefecture and this current show is tinged with an Australian influence from his travels and studies there many years ago. This cross fertilization of ideas that have influenced Morito's ceramics builds onto a cultural link between Australia and East Asian art (mainly being China and Japan).

In some ways Morito's pot designs reminds one of the Western Australian potter Gary Zeck (see link) or even Margerat Prestons prints (see link) and it is interesting to see the comparisons, even though one doubts if he had ever seen either of these Australian artists works. But there is no doubt that some kind of common memory exist historically that underpins in some way all the afore mentioned artist's praxis. And it may well stem from that old dialogue between Cezanne and Gaugiun in 1897:

' He never understood me, ' said Cezanne. I have never desired and shall never except the absence of modelling or of gradation; its nonsense. Gauguin is not a painter, he only made Chinese images.' To which Gauguin would have replied (in words he wrote to Daniel de Monfried): ' The great error is the Greek, however beautiful it may be... Keep the Persian, the Cambodians and a bit of the Egyptians always in Mind.'

And as much as this refers to western artists, the Japanese were very quick to analyse and buy innovative artworks from Cezanne, Monet and many others from that period of the French avant garde. And this overlapping of memories in fine art from both countries leads to interesting art objects and designs being made.

In Morito's exhibition there is two sensibilities of colour used within the ceramics, one is the more traditional type with the use of Japanese harmonious hues that subtlely reveal themselves to the eye and then there is the more risky Australian colours remembered from his journey to the southern continent, it makes very interesting viewing. It also raises questions as to why more exhibitions are not mounted in both countries exploring this very dynamic cultural relationship not only in a contemporary sense but with real scholarly research by major galleries into the historical precedents and not just tucked away in Asian designated galleries.

Although maybe that attitude is changing as evidenced in an interview here with new director of Londons National Gallery, Nicholas Penny:

Penny is a historian who wants to make us see the strangeness of other times and places - as well as the bizarre things that happen to paintings that survive for centuries. "I would like to encourage people to think about the history of taste in a more interesting way than, 'Oh how amazing: it belonged to Charles I.' What's much more interesting is how radically things can be misinterpreted, or differently interpreted at different dates. With Titian, Veronese and Tintoretto you're dealing with painters who have never really fallen from the highest possible esteem. If you take that permanence and then point out all the impermanence within it, that becomes a really fascinating topic, I think."

So if your in Kobe take a short walk up the mountain and see this interesting ceramic exhibition at Gallery Kitanozaka.

Penny Link:

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/art/visualart/story/0,,2268237,00.html

http://www.zeckwerkz.com.au/garryzeck.html

http://www.nga.gov.au/preston/index.cfm

Masaki Takako - Dry Point Prints - Shimada Gallery - Kobe – Japan

2008-03-28T16:54:00.000-07:00

Dry Point Print by Masaki Takako

This exhibition by Masaki Takako is a very good show and exceedingly deceptive because in first visual contact, it was perplexing as to what medium she had used in gaining these sensuous velvet like surface qualities. And what type of material she had used to achieve such amazing sensations. But in the conversation with her and the gallery staff plus armed with her history of publications and photographs, it was partially revealed how she had used her dry point etching system to attain such wonderful images.

As dry point prints they really extend the boundaries of how such art forms can exist and that is one of the most pleasing aspects about this show by Takako. Japan of all places has a long and distinguished history in print making and Takako's dry point prints in some ways have extended these boundaries, not only through her system of praxis (which is very good) but from the imagery she articulates through the linear and charcoal shapes which resonate interesting tensions, through the stategically placed forms and lines, that take the eye out of its comfort zone.

It's not often that one is confronted with shapes that are not only well placed but are really beautiful to engage as a tactile image and in this exhibition by Takako she has achieved both.

Many times with artists who exhibit shapes, their artworks contain a visual tedium in the surface qualities that can make one walk past them, almost unnoticed as if there is nothing to confront the viewer other than a marketable product, due to a lack of risk.

But at this moment in this exhibition Takako has achieved an exhibition well worthy of praise because it is so good, its not often one see this, its a standout show and its rare that such forms and surface qualities come together so succiently from the artists memory but she has accomplished this now.

So if your in Kobe, take a short walk up the mountains from JR Saynomia and see this very good print making exhibition at Shimada Gallery.

Louis CANE - Gallery Yamaki - Kobe - Japan

2008-03-18T07:37:00.000-07:00

Artworks by Louis Cane

It is interesting to see contemporary French Painting in Japan partly due to the historical connections of how modernism in art came into being and what is being made there now as art. Plus, there is the French attitude and they do have that in art as evidenced in this exhibition by Louis Cane.

This is a small showing of artworks by Cane but the ideas within the exhibition or how they have manifested themselves through praxis are complex and layered with several meanings.

There is a tendency to call these artworks Kinetic Paintings but to label something that relies on your visual flux and the never ending transient illumination of light, either by artificial means or natural, that illuminates the artwork is in some ways misleading because once anyone in the audience visually engages some of these artworks (for example as the one above), the journey of discovery within the painting begins and will not cease through time or space as long as one analysing the image, illumination exists that allows you to see the artwork and the image remains intake.

Artwork by Louis Cann

Then there is the metal mesh that the translucent paint clings onto in various layers of rose madder, cobalt blues, mid yellow/greens and purplish blues that acts an anchor to this world, like a tangible transparent door between transient memories of the ever changing liminal naunces of colour, due to ones bodily and eye movements that continually shifts the hues and tones with the artworks. Also the mesh sort of acts like gate between the static and the transience nature of light that is projected onto the wall as light penetrates through the paint traces, one is allowed to touch the surface of the paint traces but not the wefts of light behind the artwork.

As one engages these painting especially close up the nuances of subtle tones that can be seen not only on but through the paint traces on the wall behind them there is a sensation of visual delight, these images are not about the illusion of colour but colour in real time, all the time and as long there is enough illumination for the eye to see it.

And as much as Cane’s artworks are static, peering through the wire mesh and seeing the ever changing nuances of colour through ones visual flux, brings back memories heady days of late sixties/early seventies of film and how it could be seen as an artwork.

This is a really interesting exhibition of artworks and well worth visiting, so if you’re in Kobe take a short walk down to Motomachi III to Gallery Yamaki and enjoy this exhibition.

From Turner to Monet at The National Gallery of Australia

2008-03-14T03:50:00.000-07:00

Probably the most significant western landscape painting exhibition to come to Australia this year and it may well be by the sounds of it for a long time to come into the future.

If you're in Australia and like critical landscape painting, (yes, thats right, if you cant paint this well yourself with innovative ideas as these artists achieved then they're still in front of you, even though they're dead) or just very good images, this exhibition is not to be missed at the Australian National Gallery.

So save or borrow the money to travel to Canberra (as this show wont be travelling) to see these amazing artworks of Gauguin, Monet, Cezanne, Samuel Palmer, Constable, Corot and Courbet. What is also interesting is that the Australian painters like John Glover and John Russell ( who painted along side Monet in France) are exhibited alongside these critical painting theorists who used the the landscape motif to create modern art. The afore mentioned artists were the major European painters of there time and to make comparisons in how Australians bought these theories back and used them in painting within the Australian landscape is well worth seeing.

Few epochs in landscape paintings history could be so alive with ideas and these are the images, so try not to miss it, I for one will be going because you wont get a selection of art this good for a long time in Australia.

Link to the Australian National Gallery:

http://www.nga.gov.au/Home/08-AUTUMN/

Link to paintings on exhibit here many thanks to the Australian Newspaper:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23369377-5013571,00.html

artwall: An independent site for art reviews.

Umera Lyota - Gallery Shimada - Kobe - Japan

Mario TAUCHI Solo Show “Mario Mandala” Gallery Yamaki - Kobe - Japan

Kawamura Sachiyo - Butoh - Japan

Kumiko Okada - Shimada Galleries - Kobe - Japan

Picasso at Akashi City Cultural Museum – Hyogo – Japan

Sadaharu Horio Solo Show - Gallery Yamaki Fine Art - Kobe - Japan

Haruna Sato - Cofuque Cafe - Kobe - Japan

Ancient Egypt In Torino - Kobe Musuem - Japan

Gebisu Misato, Uozumi Junpei, Tokizawa Iku, Kunwata Tomoakio, Nishimura Nao, Sato Mie, Nishiumi Moe, Hashimoto Sayo, Maeda Natsuki, Nishiguchi, Serizawa Mitsue, Tamada Kanako, Katanimieko and Ohtski - Gallery Kitanozaka - Kobe - Japan

Hiroko NAKAKITA - Gallery Yamaki Fine Art - Kobe - Japan

Huzisaki Takatoshi - Gallery Shimada – Kobe - Japan

Chika Mukai - Atonement Video Installation - Gallery Ami - Kanoko - Osako - Japan

Hiroyo KOTANI Solo Show - Gallery Yamaki Fine Art - Kobe - Japan

Chisato Tomokiyo - Sensyudo Art Residency - Wajima City - Japan

Vale – Elizabeth Ford – Painter – Western Australia

Pippa Tandy - Photographs - Horikawa Gallery - Japan

Young Painters - Shimada Su - Tanaka Shusuke - Matsui Satoko - Gallery Den - Osaka

Photography - "Naruki Oshima-Reflections" Nomart Contemporary Gallery - Osaka

Kobe Biennale 2009 - Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art - Guest Artists Exhibition “LINK - Flexible Deviation”

Terumi Shinryo - Gallery Horikawa - Kobe - Japan

Louis Cane Solo Show - Yamaki Gallery Fine Art - Kobe Japan

Preview of Collaborative Artworks - Nadiff - New Art Diffusion - Japan

Bridges in Osaka, Kobe and Awaji - Japan

Tokyo Photo 2009

Yoshiki Hase - The Happiness Within - Housing Works - New York - Gallery Yamaki - Kobe - Japan

Sachi Yoshimaka Mono Prints - Gallery Shimada - Kobe - Japan

Matsui Kensaku - Gallery KAi - Kobe - Japan

Veronika Dobers - Golden Bundles and Blue Heaps - Gallery Yamaka Fine Art - Kobe - Japan

The Louvre Museum Exhibition: Master Paintings of 17th Century Europe

Mari Kouno - Paintings - Shimada Galleries - Kobe - Japan

Twinism AD & A Gallery - Osaka - Japan

Pippa Tandy - Salt-Tide - Photographs - Kurb Gallery - Western Australia

Hiroshi Sugumoto - History of History - National Museum of Art Osaka - Japan

Feel - Video Installation - Chika Mukai - A D & A Gallery - Osaka - Japan

Izuno Yuji - Shimada Galleries - Kobe - Japan

Lee Min-Ho - Portable Landscape (digital photographs) - Gallery Yamaki - Motomachi - Kobe - Japan

LPA Large Format Photographers Association of Japan - Old Hyogo Prefecture Museum - Kobe - 2009

Hirata Tutsuya - Shimada Gallery - Kobe - Japan

Kevin Robertson on the Goldfields but the painting mother lode is yet to found

Art Fair Tokyo 2009 and The Great Australian no Show!!!!!

Megumi Sakakibara - Shimada Galleries - Kobe - Japan

Kayo Nomura K A I Gallery - Kobe - Japan

German Artist Florian Sussmayr - Gallery Yamaki - Kobe

In Memory of Arthur Russell - Artist - Western Australia

Kikuko Sakota - Shimada Gallery - Kobe

European Still-Life Painting from the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien - Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Art

Eleanor Heartney – An American Opinion - coming to the Perth Festival of Art

Kaito Saiko - Gallery Yamaki - Motomachi - Kobe - Japan

Hiroyuki Sugawara - Futaba Gallery - Ginza - Tokyo

Hisao Sakai & Shimada Gallery Collection - Shimada Gallery - Kobe

Important Lecture at CAP House Kobe at O2

20 Years of Chinese Contemporary Art - The National Museum of Art Osaka

Painters I admire amongst todays arts industry.

Miki Toshie - Gallery K.A.I - Kobe Japan

Ten Artists - Gallery Shimada – Kobe – Japan

Culture Day Japan and a visit to Itami Art Museum - Hyogo Prefecture - Japan

Wantanabe Nobuko - Gallery Yamaki Fine Art - Motomachi - Kobe - Japan

Corot - Souvenirs et Variations - Kobe City Museum

Martin Heine - Gallery East - North Fremantle - Western Australia

Kiyohara Takehiko, Mass of Light, Tor Road Gallery, Kobe, Japan

Ayumi Shigematsu & Youko Inoue Shimada Galleries, Kobe, Japan

Artists and the Stock Market Crash

Jeff Mincham and Pippin Drysdale - Perth Galleries - Western Australia

The World of Claude Monet - Nagoya Boston Museum of Fine Arts - Nagoya - Japan

Permenant collection- Hyogo Prefecture Museum of Art - Kobe - Japan

Small Works - Gallery Shimada - Kobe - Japan

Joerg Lehmann - Fine Art Photography- Gallery Yamaki - Kobe

Haramiishi Kazuko Textiles and Performance – IchiGoya- Kobe

Three Keystones - Ashiya City Museum of Art and History

Mayumi TERADA Fine Art Photographer - Gallery Yamaki - Kobe - Japan

The Yatate (portable writing implement)Tawara Art Museum Foundation - Ashiya - Hyogo - Japan

Hirokuni Takeuchi - Talk is Cheap & Tetsuo Hayashi Istanbul, Bologna and Paris Gallery Shimada - Kobe

Stiff Cheese Hot Press Release, Book Launch: CODES The art of Janis Nedlela 1982 - 2007 by David Bromfield

Sakabe Takayoshi Painitng - Ashiya Kakimoto Clinic - Ashiya - Japan

Shimokura Tae and Okatamoto Mitsuhiro - Gallery - Haneusagi - Kyoto - Japan

Yamaguchi Makio - Chung Sang Hwa Gallery K.A.I - Kobe - Japan

Idiosyncratic Visions - Hiroko Takahama and Nobuko Hayashi - Australian National University - Foyer Gallery

TURNER TO MONET - the triumph of landscape painting - Australian National Gallery - Canberra - Australia

Cresside Collette - Drill Hall Gallery - ANU - Canberra - Australia

Mario TAUCHI Solo Show　“Mario Mandala”　 Gallery Yamaki - Kobe - Japan

LPA　Large Format Photographers Association of Japan - Old Hyogo Prefecture Museum - Kobe - 2009