Yozakura

Yozakura – a night viewing of sakura. It is a very special feeling; there is a light coming from within the tree and flowers closer to you appear purple, while inside, near the light source, they look white.  Here I experimented with very reflective, metallic dark blue, in combination with light difference on sakura.  I wanted to achieve darkness yet at same time to preserve light and cheerful sensation. With this play of light I have opened a way to presentation of different stages of day or weather condition. Metallic colors capture enough light to reflect and bounce between layers, even in dark surrounding the picture is visible and it has a soothing effect.

Technique: mixed media (acrylic on glass, PVC cel, canvas with wooden frame)

Size: 36,5 x 46,5 x 5,7 cm

Year: February 2019

Availability: In Private Collection


Diorama

This series of kacho-e (pictures of birds, flowers and insects) is inspired by Japanese cel animation and tradition of omocha-e (kumiage-e) / tatebanko. Recently I have experienced a joy of painting on plexiglass surface and this very much reminded me of transferring drawing on animation cel and coloring it. When I received a set of cels from anime in 2016, I almost had a chance to make a composition of 3 layers of cels from Arcadia of My Youth: Endless Orbit SSX, but two got stuck together, and I couldn´t separate them without damage. I wanted to experiment a little bit with PVC cel. The second source of influence comes from tatebanko (ancient setting), 2.5D paper craft diorama, that originally comes from omocha-e (paper toy for children), that could be a print of board game to diorama setting – kumiage-e, popular in late Edo period. Kumiage-e (building up pictures) is ukiyo-e print that was sold as a set for diorama of kabuki scene and they originated from paper crafted scenes for kabuki theatre and toy theatre. Tatebanko is quite popular in Japan, and the scenes can be either very easy to build (featuring characters like Hello Kitty-chan), to really complex dioramas of buildings and houses.