Origin & Echoes - Now Open
No matter the venue, it’s always a thrill when a new exhibition of collection opens. That’s as true for my website as it is for a gallery or museum.
So, I’m thrilled to announce that Origins & Echoes is open and ready to excite you!
This collection is especially fun for me because it includes a bunch of art that I never expected to feature on my site - and some that makes me a little anxious given how different it is from my current work. A little anxiousness can be a good thing in art.
In my previous post I gave a little background on how and why this show came together. (tl;dr: My mom is getting ready to move, and a whole bunch of artwork suddenly was unearthed and became available!)
Three Phases
In many ways, Origins & Echoes is a retrospective of the early days my art career. Some people hurl themselves face-first into the chomping teeth of new ventures. I went to art school. That was the first phase. Phase 2, my work as an illustrator, overlapped both with school and the period that came later. Moving to Japan, and segueing from illustration to making art for collectors and galleries is the final phase.
The Student
In the time before time, in the days and eons before history was first chiseled onto slate tablets and hurled at the cowering heads of the masses, I was a lowly and confused art student.
This was a step up.
Before that, I was a lowly and confused teacher of English conversation in the deep countryside of Japan who had come to the realization that making pictures for a living was something I’d like to try. How this was going to happen, or even what form or substance these pictures might take was an entirely nebulous matter.
I pursued illustration. That’s where I discovered cut-paper art, and my work began its slow evolution into what it is today (where it continues to evolve in new directions, because...art!)
Yep, there’s a smattering of student work in this collection! Specifically, the best of that period (although some of the un-included chimerical experiments and mind-melting color choices are really, really entertaining). It’s fun to trace the ripples of this early work into my later illustration and modern creations. There is a through-line. It is meandering and often ends up in peculiar cul-de-sacs and dead ends. But it does exist.
Take for example my interest in pop culture, pulp-ish sci-fi, and human relations. Thematically, this was where my interests in transformation, inclusion v. separation, and inspiration started taking form. Symbolically, there’s the water, the holes, and the animals.
The Illustrator
While still in school, I started getting various and varied job illustrating. And I have to say, I really enjoyed it! I worked mostly in editorial (magazine) illustration, and dabbled in children’s book styles.
Editorial work taught me speed and efficiency. But most importantly, it helped me get a firmer handle on how to take difficult ideas and concepts and turn them into images; how to take an emotion and communicate it with color, shape, and movement.
Children’s book work taught me how to have fun, and show that fun. This niche is all about how to simplify an image down to its core parts while still including lots of fun details - without letting the details take over or distract.
These are lessons I’m still trying to perfect with my work now.
Art in Japan
Then I moved back to Japan.
The main benefit of this move was access.
First, access to lots and lots of great papers. Stuff I could never find anywhere else. Unique, hand-made washi, colorful patterned chiyogami.
Second, to time and the opportunity to experiment. For the first few years in Japan, I was still doing some illustration work, but less and less over time. I suddenly had the chance to make art based on my own themes (as opposed to trying to fit my themes in to art based on others’ texts). I experimented with materials. I still do.
Most exciting, I continued to expand on and explore those themes that have interested me since before I was even a student. Inspiration, transformation and metamorphosis, pop culture, nature.
