Paper Craft Exhibition

I was invited to be a part of a group exhibition of origami and other paper folding related art at Charles B. Wang Center of Stony Brook University, Long Island, NY. This exhibition is to ccommemorate the atomic bombs and 70th anniversary of the end of the World War II. It will open on September 9th, 2015 and run through December 31st. I decided to work on a completely new piece for this show. The concept is my reflection on the current state of the world we are in especially on a very frustrating result of the Nuclear Anti Proliferation Treaty meeting at the UN Headquarter in NYC this past May. It is very disheartening to realize that, after all these years, we are repeating the same mistakes over and over again as if we never learned anything from our past. I thought about the concepts long and hard and finally decided to make it simple and straightforward. This is not conceptual mumbo-jumbo high art and decidedly so.

After a series of revisions on the designs of the piece, I finally settled with a diptych format. Below are a few work in progress shots I snapped.

Some of the atomic bombs falling from the sky. I made total 28 of them. These are going to be on the first panel.

This boy will be standing under the falling bombs against the burning sky. I will probably color him a llittle.

This is the dove on the second panel flying against the blue sky.

These are some of the feathers falling from the sky behind the dove. I made approx. 60 of these.

A detail shot of the feathers. It took me a long time to score all those lines on them. They were all made by hand individually. These 2 panels will be connected by a red thread the dove is carrying with its beak and the end of the thread will be held by the boy. I have a mental image of how this piece is going to look when it's done. I hope the actual finished piece is going to look as good as I am hoping...

Update on Monday, July 20, 2015 at 12:25PM by Hiroshi Hayakawa

I colored the boy. This looks better.

Update on Vanitas #3

After a year of interruption, I finally got back to working on Vanitas #3 I had started last summer. This image has soooo much fabric in it and I am using graphite, so it is naturally going very slow. On top of that, I have been working on another project simultaneously right now (I am going to post on this 2nd project shortly). So that too is slowing down the progress of this piece. Anyway, I have almost finished 1/3 of the piece. This is going to be part 1 of a diptych. I hope I can complete this part 1 before the end of this summer.

Jakuchu Ito 伊藤若冲 (1716~1800)

The other day we went to Jotenkaku (承天閣）Museum at Shoukoku-ji (相国寺）temple in Kyoto to see a special exhibit of Jakuchu paintings. In 2012, 33 of his paintings came to Washington D.C. and I missed it (I only got a catalog from the D.C. exhibit), so when I found out that this museum had this show going, I decided I just had to go see it.

Shoukoku-ji had many well-kept beautiful gardens and we really enjoyed strolling around. Then we went into the museum to see Jakuchu's paintings. Boy, I wasn't disappointed. The colors, brush strokes, designs, everything I expected to see was right there and a lot more! The dynamic yet extremely sophisticated brush movements, control of ink and paint are just breath-taking. The sense of liveliness he injected into his subjects (birds, fish, or whatever they are) with a touch of humor was very entertaining and you'd never get bored.  Nanette and I were just in awe and tried to soak up as much as we could before we had to leave.

I had a couple of art magazines on Jakuchu with me and they taught me how his paintings were made. I found out how innovative and experimental he was, trying new pigments, combining different painting methods, some of them were highly unconventional at his time. This really deepened my appreciation of his mastery.

I took a few photos of this exhibit (though no photos were allowed). The light was dim in order to protect his fragile paintings on silk, so I had to use a very high ISO setting on my camera and the pictures were very grainy.

This is a detail of this tree peonies painting. He painted the leaves by combining 2 different painting materials: fabric dye for the wide parts of the leaves and pigments for the veins. He managed to create 2 different textures for this technique. He also applied flat colors on the back of the silk before painting the front side with more details. That way he could let the colors on the back peek through the woven fabric in a very subtle fashion and also the thick, built-up paint on both sides intensified the colors. The effect of this technique is more visible in the flowers and the bird in this particular painting.

He also used paper dyed in black sumi ink on the back of the silk for support. This black paper dropped the value of the parts of the silk that were not painted or thinly painted, and helped increase the contrast between the painted subjects and the surrounding negative spaces and at the same time intensified the colors of the paintings more. Just brilliant.

Some comical depictions of animals.

Jusaburo Tsujimura studio

Nanette and I are in Japan right now. Today we went to one of my idols Jusaburo Tsujimura's studio in Tokyo. We ran into him on the way to his studio and took a picture with him. We were not allowed to take photos inside his shop, but we saw a fantastic display of his incredible creations in the glass cases. We were just mesmerized by the total visual overload. 

Anyway, he noticed a tortoise hairpin Nanette was wearing in her hair. I explained to him how much she loved her hairpin. Then, unexpectedly, he started searching in his desk drawer and found a couple of gorgeous tortoise pins and gave them to Nanette as a gift! How generous of him, we couldn't believe how lucky we were! I managed to find a few pictures online of him working in the studio as well as some of his breathtaking dolls. You can see them at the end of this post.

The entrance to his studio.

Nanette and I with the artist.

These are the tortoise hairpins he gave Nanette!

He was very frail. When I asked him if he was still doing his doll making workshops, he told me that he was going to relocate his studio to Hiroshima prefecture this year. He said he was over 80 years old now and wanted to live in his hometown. He is going to do his workshops there once he gets settled. I told him maybe I would take his workshop in Hiroshima. He was a very sweet gentleman.

Koo Schadler workshop

I attended Koo Schadler's egg tempera workshop this past weekend. It was an excellent 3-day workshop at Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, WV and I learned so much from her. She showed us what could be achieved with this painting process by demonstrating various techniques as well as talking about the science of its ingredients while touching upon many painters' processes in history of art. I took some snap shots during the workshop.

Here is Koo on the right doing a demo for the attendees.

This was the table set up. Egg cracking station and pigment stations.

Various pigment pastes she had prepared for us.

The beginning of my painting. We were told to work based off of a photograph she took. I covered the background with a few layers of paint.

I scraped the portion of the pear with a razor blade re-surfacing the gesso ground. I did some work on the marble base that looks more like granite... You can see the masks I was using.

Worked on the pear.

Added a little more details to the pear. This is how it looked after a couple coats of nourishing layers. This is probably about 20% finished. You can see it is still far from being done when you compare it to the photograph on the left. Koo says she usually builds up 40 to 60 layers of colors on her paintings. I probably have only a dozen layers on my pear...

This workshop inspired me tremendously. It also made me realize I really have to do better time management and be able to set up solid studio time for myself if I continue to do this type of painting.