Japan Painting

Saatchi-gallery asked:


Christian Ward’s eye-grabbingly vivid paintings where Technicolor mountains, caverns and grottoes shimmer with rainbows, cascade with multicoloured waterfalls and are wreathed in iridescent mist.Ward’s wanderings have taken him from the mountains of Scotland and across America into the Arizona desert, but his most recent paintings – and the ones that caught Charles Saatchi’s eye – have their starting point in Yakushima, an island off the southern coast of Japan. This World Heritage Site with its virgin, swampy jungle and rocky mountains plunging into the ocean, is not only scenically spectacular, but also has a personal signiÞcance. Ward’s mother is Japanese and her family originally came from this area;

‘It’s always about a primary experience and then coming back and not doing a topography, but making something surprising and revealing about the landscape,’ he says. ‘Contemplation is a very big part of the process.’The influences of this 25-year-old graduate of the Royal Academy Schools range from Sixties psychedelic graphic design to ancient Chinese paintings, as well as the latest Japanese animation techniques. Yet for all their phantasmagoric otherworldliness – one critic described them as a cross between Fantasia and The Land That Time Forgot – they are always based on the direct experience of a real place.

Then there’s the physical quality of the paint itself: no shiny surfaces and quick-drying acrylic here, but juicy areas of oil paint that gives the work a direct physical immediacy that prevents it from tumbling into kitsch. Ward attaches great importance to technique and applies his paint in lush, sweeping brushstrokes that he’s compared to the raking of gravel around the rocks in Zen gardens. ‘I’m very interested in this idea of origin, and for me origin as a subject is very hard to pinpoint. Painting, because of its history, deals with origin very well. It’s got this life to it that isn’t apparent in a lot of other mediums’.While he’s happy to have been singled out by Saatchi, ‘it means I can carry on, which is a good thing.’ Ward is already pondering new avenues,

what to Do Next…

Find more information about Christian Ward Exhibitions or looking for his paintings please visit us on

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/christian_ward.htm



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Saatchi-gallery asked:


Li Songsong, a young artist in the 70s, has been in recent years investigating the relation between public images and their transposition onto canvas. In the shift to painting these pictures, which are mainly old photos related to historical characters and facts, he hasn’t protracted the cognitive style as for some previous artists’ practice of criticizing, exposing, questioning, or satirizing and propagandizing about a certain historical period, but has used a kind of imagery enacting an objective approach. In other words, in the use of the historical image-material that interested him, Li Songsong hasn’t made any seemingly solved judgment of the historical value, on the contrary it is just from a visual point of view that has to be sensed the objective, simple and direct power of history as shifted or transplanted onto canvas.Li Songsong deliberately plays down the potential implication of the images he chooses for his pictures eliminating his personal feelings from these images by adopting an arms length procedure for his work.The painting of the soldiers digging the trench, for example, was a picture he saw by chance. He felt attracted to the process of looking at photographs. When he look at pictures in a book, he usually turn them over when we understand the meaning in them. He painted this picture probably because he looked at it so closely. It was a very plain photograph, some people in uniform were digging into the earth.

Li Songsong painting was based on a magazine image of a scene from the war against Japan War in the 1940s, depicting some Chinese soldiers carrying a Japanese airplane they had shot down, carrying it to Chongqing, a Chinese city in southwestern China. The captured airplane was a sign of triumph and a great source of pride to the Chinese. The artist has divided the image into two halves and purposely painted them with a few variations. For instance, the right half of the painting was blown up a bit more than its left side, intentionally revealing the artist’s manipulation of the image and his suspicion of the ideological connotation of such images and their authenticity. The relation between photography and painting brings forth quite clear shades of a new historicism, not making history look like a truly existing objective whole, but a topographic map made up of different pieces of historical texts, that is to say that history is that of a certain culture being edificated in its articulation. This change in the concept of history indicates that the artist’s representation of historical memories is not purely objective and neutral, but conceiving contemporary cognitions and experiences within its articulated structure; what it points out is not past but precisely contemporary. In other words, the artist by means of historical images is here re-narrating the recount of history and with the aid of narration we can get from the hazy mist of history a clearer image of ourselves, surveying the state of our own existence.



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John Ugoshowa asked:


Also known as Cubist Realism, and related to the Art Deco movement, Precisionism was developed in the United States after World War I. The term for this movement was coined in the 1920s, and influenced by the Cubist and Futurist movements; the main themes for these paintings were mainly regarding industrialization and modernization of the American landscape. These elements were depicted with the use of precise and sharply defined geometrical shapes, a reverence for the industrial age, but with social commentary not a directly fundamental part.

The degrees of abstraction ran the spectrum as some works had photo realistic qualities, and though the movement had no presence outside of the United States, the artists that made up this particular grouping were a closely knit collective remaining active through to the 1930s. Georgia O’Keefe remained as one of the leading proponents of this style, and stayed so for many years afterwards until the 1960s, her husband was a highly regarded mentor for the group. In a post post-Expressionist phase of life in the art world, Precisionism has affected and influenced the movements of magic realism which utilizes aspects such as juxtaposing of forward movement with a sense of distance, and pop art in which themes from mass culture were used to define art much there forward.

Just after the 1950s began, the movement of pop art was clear in places such as Britain and the United States, and employed elements of advertising and comic books to create a foundation that might have been taken as a reaction to the then popular movement of abstract expressionism. Though the term wasn’t coined until 1958, it was later linked with Dadaism from the beginning of the century, and at one point was called Neo-Dada because of the strong influence from artist Marcel Duchamp. Later affecting artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, bringing the definition to come to mean one of low-cost mass-produced and gimmicky artwork, and stressing everyday values with common sources like product packaging and celebrity photographs.

By exploring that fraction of everyday imagery, the artists found themselves working with contemporary consumer culture, and this became apparent in parts of Britain, Spain, and Japan around the same point in time. In Britain in particular, where pop art seemed to stem from at that point in 1947, and many works began blurring the boundaries between art and advertising. Whereas in Spain, the movement became interrelated with the “new figurative”, the work arose from the roots of informalism which began to be a critical aspect in this part of the world.

In Japan, pop art has been seen and utilized throughout much of the country’s native artwork through such means as Anime and the “superflat” styles of art, and became the means through which the artists could further critique their own culture through a more satirical lens. When choosing a stimulating piece by these artists, it may be a more invigorating exercise to find some of those other artists to whom these later artists owe much of their inspiration towards their own work, and Precisionism is just as appropriate a place to start for you as anywhere else in the artistic spectrum.

Today, Precisionism can be seen as fundamental influence in commercial and popular art, but cannot be too overlooked as being one of a few different movements to affect our present day stance on art’s utility and functions. With the postmodern present coming to light, maybe we shall once again be drawn back to the past that we have come to take for granted too often, and reveal a new age to define a new century of experience.



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Saatchi-gallery asked:


Will Fowler was born on 1969 in Winston-Salem and currently lives and Works in Los Angeles.Will Fowler’s plethoric patterned canvases are mesmerising in their intensity. Drawing association to 20th c masters such as Dubuffet, Pollock, and Miro, Fowler approaches painting as purist pursuit, recycling and quoting from his own lexicon of gesture, mark-making, and iconography. Often taking years to complete, Fowler’s paintings refuse to resolve as totalities, but rather dazzle with their cacophonous overabundance of energy and contradiction. In TBD, Fowler’s enmeshed motifs compile with vivacious tension, each dot, square, and triangle vying for individual recognition; the solidity of his geometry further unsettled with casual intuitiveness of painterly gesture.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2007

• White Columns, New York

• David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

2004

• Don’t Eat Yellow Bricks, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

2001

• Galerie Hohenlohe und Kalb, Vienna, Austria

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2006

• Dereconstruction, curated by Matthew Higgs, Gladstone Gallery, New York

• Cloudbreak, Hiromi Yoshii, Organized by David Kordansky, Tokyo, Japan

• (keep feeling) fascination : recent abstract painting in Los Angeles, Luckman Gallery, Cal State L.A., Los Angeles

• Hotel California, Glendale College Art Gallery, Glendale

• Concepts from Painting, curated by Martin Prinzhorn, Ar/ge Kunst Galerie Museum/Galleria Museo, Bolzano, Italy

2005

• Beyond the Painted Horizon, Bakersfield College Gallery, Bakersfield

• Sugartown, Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York

2003

• Inaugural Exhibition, Golinko Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

• Paintingshow, Austrian Art Studio, Chicago

2001

• Will Fowler and Aiko Hachisuka, Hot Coco Lab, Los Angeles

2000

• Upward, not Northward, Storage Gallery, Los Angeles

• Scale, Galerie Hohenlohe und Kalb, Vienna, Austria

1998

• Raw Hide, Zolla-Lieberman Gallery, Chicago

• Polymorphous Memorialus, Post, Los Angeles

Conclusions:

Initially appearing frenetic and consuming, Will Fowler’s layered paintings insist upon perception as an investigative, not passive, process.

What to Do Next…

If you want any information about Will Fowler or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/will_fowler.htm



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