Updates…
There haven’t been a lot of updates on my personal work in a while, but there are things going on in the background. In October and November I’ll be in a few group shows with my drawings and I’m busy working on a painting for a restaurant wall right now. Over the next week or so I’m hoping to update the galleries and get everything up to the minute too, so it’s been fairly busy recently!
I spent a good few days in the workshop with saws and hammers, perspex, D.I.Y lighting and wood glue with the ambitious idea of designing and making my own light desk. The results turned out satisfactory, but weren’t without incident. After a near scrape melting the perspex with a regular tungsten globe, I switched to environmentally friendly, energy conscious LED, and so far so good. So enjoy the results of my first work, and check back soon for those updates.
Hoholy-Nagy In Motion…
Being the Obon holidays in Japan just last week, I got some time off to go on a little road trip to visit the relatives in Kyoto. Fortunately, we had some extra time which we spent trawling the galleries within vicinity. The Momak had a great retrospective exhibition of the constructivist multidisciplinary artist Moholy-Nagy. So we spent an afternoon out of the heat of summer indoors, with some experimental photography and geometric painting. It was exhaustive and intimate, and by the end of the show (which covered everything from his early drawings, set-design and light/movement contraptions, to his late and final paintings) we felt we got an insight into a very diverse and productive lifetime within the space of 2 hours. If you have the opportunity to visit the Momak, check it out. The accompanying essays and book are well worth a look too, and don’t forget to grab a copy of the fantastic free poster.
This is the first one-man exhibition in Japan introducing the entirety of the Hungarian-born artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), who is known as a constructivist and a teacher at the Bauhaus.
His wide-ranging activities including photography, design, film, kinetic art and art education were consistently in pursuit of “the new vision” brought about by “artistic use of light and movement” and therefore he is esteemed as a pioneer in media art.
Tadanori Yokoo…
I’ve posted about Tadanori Yokoo a few times before. He’s a cool dude, and his old school designs still look as fresh as they did almost 50 years ago. These days he’s more focused on painting, and Japan Times has posted a great interview with him revealing some of the reasons he decided to drop design for more personal creative avenues. Enjoy.