Art Studio Piece #1My Way

2. In my painting I wanted to do something similar and portray Japanese culture in an interesting way. Since we needed to include a figure in this piece I thought playing with reflections would be something interesting. So I took a series of photos on the roof, where the puddles from the rain made perfect reflections. My idea was to use the reflection to portray two different figures. For example painting a modern person and a more traditional figure on the reflection. This idea was inspired from last years chowa year book cover.

1. During my research I came across a very interesting Japanese surrealist painter called Tetsuya Ishida, who based many of his pieces on ʻthe lost decade of Japan.ʼ Many of his surreal piece portray very chilling and lifeless figures, which represent the state of the Japanese society during that time. His surreal compositions have a large impact on the audience, however are also very deep. For example the piece on the right hand side includes several human like figure, however the bottom half of the body is a plastic bag most likely from a convenient store. This piece depicts a social state where people stay in their rooms without engaging with the outer world and live off cheap and unhealthy convenient snack. Many of his pieces portray common issues that society faces through a surrealist composition, which I found extremely interesting.

3. I was also very keen and attracted to use the colors and night scenery of a common Japanese shopping street because it is very distinct and unique to urban Japanese cities. Since I wanted to use both a figure and a street view I decided to use perspective to fuse the two.

4. For my figure I did not want to use a plain person so I decided to have Max be my figure. I choose Max because his appearance have characteristic and I also thought he would be an interesting figure to paint and have in my piece.

5. The photos above are parts of the process, which I took between painting. Unfortunately I did not take a lot of photos so the entire process cannot be viewed, however what you can see above is a stage where I struggled with decision making. The first photo on the left corner was my first composition, where I use perspective except you can only view one side of the road. Since I wanted depth in my piece I decided to change the composition so that you can see both sides of the street. This took up a lot of my time and it showed me the importance of having a well planned compositions.

3. When I was researching a painting style a came across some of Wassily Kandinsky’s early works, which I found very Interesting, for example the usage of bright colors and this brush strokes. I decided to try and use his style in my painting

Finished piece: