Monday, 18 November 2019

Pictures of Twilight - The Evening Scene in Modern Painting - Kobe City Koiso Memorial Museum of Art


Kobe City Koiso Memorial Museum of Art



Some exhibitions in Japan have a way about them in springing the most wonderful artistic discoveries upon you through revealing artists that are sublimely beautiful by the way they create artworks that the word painter doesn’t seem to do them justice. I am not sure what to call such artists but they sit not in a kind of academic or academy hierarchical  system but like poets of colour, line and form operating way out from the avant-garde boundary riders  only to be introduced into art world once they've left this planet and my guess is that is the only way this particular type of artist can exist is alone, ignored and mostly impoverished.


Such artwork discoveries within outstandingly curated exhibitions like the aforementioned titled one above are one of my great joys of going to museums where those faraway, tucked away, stunning images by outsider artists but seen a remembered by scholarly curators are bought into the public memory, its bliss and this show there is many to be seen.


The title of this exhibition is wonderful Pictures of Twilight that time of the day where long or momentary reflections take place as one gazes slightly skyward towards the horizon at the shifting nuances of the heavenly hues transforming into themselves into nocturne, this societal memory appears to be a universal moment, common to all peoples and if this show is anything to go recorded by its artists and poets.


For example, there is one smallish post card size water colour work in this exhibition by OSHITA Toijiro 1870 -1911 titled: Setting Sun n.d. 9.1 x 14.2 cm, it is a stunning example of grand small scale beauty of the artist's evening gaze out across a water-way towards the setting sun, its poetry in painting with an immediacy due to the size of the work and how that limits the influence of delay in praxis, the paper is imbued with delicately laid floods water colour in the evening lights of yellow ochres, merging into light purple magenta hues downwards and outwards towards the horizon with a contrast  of a low key tan purple distance landscape across the water as a boat gently drifts over the glassy magenta, grey, purple, olive-yellow aquatic stretch with a coral-red setting sun flickering off the water as the vessel sails though it into the nocturne, it’s a wonderful sensory experience to witness in paint.

Then there is the woodblock prints of KAWASE Hasui1883 – 1957 especially his image Twelve Scenes of Tokyo, Dusk at Kiba, 1920, 36.3 x 24.2 cm again the beautiful hues of evening reflecting on a glassy river silhouetting the growing urban heavy industrial terrain of Tokyo, its working-class beauty.


Other surprises in this show were some of the more obscure European works that were on show especially Alfred SISLEY’S painting titled: Riverside Reeds at Sunset stunning image and he must be one of most under-rated painters of all the impressionists and there is another great small painting on exhibit by John CONSTABLE titled: Trees on Hampstead Heath at Sunset, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 25.2 x 29.2 cm, these are just a few of the amazing array of wonderful images within this exhibition and if you're in Osaka or Kobe make sure you get to this exhibition at Kobe City Koiso Memorial Museum of Art it’s well worth the trip.

Monday, 4 November 2019

Takehiro Terabayashi - Small Life - Yoshimi Arts- Osaka


Painting by Takehiro Terabayashi  - courtesy of Yoshimi Arts 

Takerhiro Terabayashi painting exhibition titled:Small Life at Yoshimi Arts in Osaka is a series of small scale, very interesting, well painted canvasses of what one might call the humble apartment belongings of a hardworking Japanese salary man.

The Japanese are hard workers they're also very minimal in what they have within their household belongings being just a few utensils, some furniture and electrical appliances, its impressive to see coming from the west, especially Australia where people have big houses, cars and unbelievable natural resources that allows free entry into art galleries, museums and hospitals this doesn't happen in Japan. 

For all genders, its brutally tough in Japan and in this series of paintings by Terabayashi one gets to see a range of images that resonate the bare necessities attached to that hard work ethic, for many of the paintings don't exhibit opulence or the extravagances of a rich or overly comfortable existence. But a salaryman's life of existing in a smallish apartment with just enough room to paint, eat, work and sleep.

In some ways looking at Terabayashi's painted possessions (pots, old phones, stoves tops, door handles and latches)  executed with forensic detail and passion, reminds me of the painting by Vincent van Gogh titled: Bedroom in Arles (first Version 1888) who also  painted his meager belongs.

This is a great show but as I have said before it is time for  Terabayashi to travel to Europe or more specifically London and study at the National Portrait Gallery the surface qualities by the likes of Lucian Freud, Diego Velázquez,  Rembrandt etc..., for a least a year or two, for I think it will help him to be an even better painter than he is now.