A pictorial post
I'm spending today around the house, drinking coffee and catching up on my DVD watching, and intermittently, going through all my art links. Some of them I'd forgotten all about, and it's kind of fun following all these forgotten links and unearthing all these old files off my external hard-drive. Like finding treasure!
I have quite a few Japanese ones, as expected, and this I think is my favorite:
I'm not one to bomb Hokusai; his landscapes are fantastic, but when it comes to little social scenes like this, I think Mizuno Toshikata had an edge on Hokusai. It's very simple in essence, yet he's been really clever with the composition. See the window above the lady bent over? The view through it is almost like a continuation of the scroll hanging on the other wall. The colours (my mother has a print of this and one of the sequel images) are really vivid. I'm also kind of fond of this one:
which is one of Ogawa Kazuma's pieces. Technically it's a bit of a cheat- a black and white photo shot that was later coloured, but even so it's a nice effect and it looks stunning. I suppose you could also argue it's kind of soulless, and I admit I wouldn't be rushing to buy a copy (and if I did it would be an office/loo hanging, if you know what I mean). I'm sure others would argue it has a lot of soul; it's just rather obscurely japanese.
Sticking with something bleak, here's something by a man I mentioned more than a few times when writing about business in Japan and the negative images associated with it;
It's by Ishida Tetsuya and it's one of the last works he did before, rather sadly, he did as many other's before him have done and committed suicide. Much of his work had these rather surreal and creepy overtones, sometimes quite humorous in a dark way. This one I find especially sad though, and a rather near the knuckle representation of visiting someone in hospital who is no longer really 'there'.
Time for something a bit brighter, I think:
I'm not normally one for Abstracts of any sort, and I must admit, wonderful as they must be in person, half the prints seem to have rather dingy colours and I find them personally hard to like. However, it's rather difficult to dislike a man who says "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul," and means it in a rather more literal sense than one would imagine. I'm talking, of course, about Wassily Kandinsky, who oddly enough cropped up more than once in my cognitive Psychology class. According to various sources, Kandinsky 'suffers' synthenasia, a condition wherein normally arbitrary stimuli get combined with sensory information. In his case, when he sees colours and shapes, he also hears musical tones, and his paintings are visual orchestral pieces, if you like. I think then, that a lot of the appeal of his work is to try and imagine what each part would sound like.
I think that's all for now :3 perhaps some more if I find them and people are interested. What do you guys like?
I have quite a few Japanese ones, as expected, and this I think is my favorite:
I'm not one to bomb Hokusai; his landscapes are fantastic, but when it comes to little social scenes like this, I think Mizuno Toshikata had an edge on Hokusai. It's very simple in essence, yet he's been really clever with the composition. See the window above the lady bent over? The view through it is almost like a continuation of the scroll hanging on the other wall. The colours (my mother has a print of this and one of the sequel images) are really vivid. I'm also kind of fond of this one:
which is one of Ogawa Kazuma's pieces. Technically it's a bit of a cheat- a black and white photo shot that was later coloured, but even so it's a nice effect and it looks stunning. I suppose you could also argue it's kind of soulless, and I admit I wouldn't be rushing to buy a copy (and if I did it would be an office/loo hanging, if you know what I mean). I'm sure others would argue it has a lot of soul; it's just rather obscurely japanese.
Sticking with something bleak, here's something by a man I mentioned more than a few times when writing about business in Japan and the negative images associated with it;
It's by Ishida Tetsuya and it's one of the last works he did before, rather sadly, he did as many other's before him have done and committed suicide. Much of his work had these rather surreal and creepy overtones, sometimes quite humorous in a dark way. This one I find especially sad though, and a rather near the knuckle representation of visiting someone in hospital who is no longer really 'there'.
Time for something a bit brighter, I think:
I'm not normally one for Abstracts of any sort, and I must admit, wonderful as they must be in person, half the prints seem to have rather dingy colours and I find them personally hard to like. However, it's rather difficult to dislike a man who says "Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another purposively, to cause vibrations in the soul," and means it in a rather more literal sense than one would imagine. I'm talking, of course, about Wassily Kandinsky, who oddly enough cropped up more than once in my cognitive Psychology class. According to various sources, Kandinsky 'suffers' synthenasia, a condition wherein normally arbitrary stimuli get combined with sensory information. In his case, when he sees colours and shapes, he also hears musical tones, and his paintings are visual orchestral pieces, if you like. I think then, that a lot of the appeal of his work is to try and imagine what each part would sound like.
I think that's all for now :3 perhaps some more if I find them and people are interested. What do you guys like?