the title is: “Варежка”. it’s a russian soviet animation.
according to farhad2000 from videosift, in russia these type of animations were shown on TV in the evening, so the whole family could watch together. most of the animations were based on fairy tales.
beautiful stories and beautiful colours. if only animations were like this nowadays, they wouldn’t cause pokemon panic. :P
i’m thinking about russia these days because my drawings got linked from a stylish russian design site, omami. from their post i learned how to write “plastique monkey” in russian, using the cyrillic alphabet. welcome to Пластик Манки. i don’t know how to pronounce it.
when i first started this blog, the header image was a different photo of mine, in black and white. the title was written in the “Soviet” font, which makes english writing look like cyrillic. the “O” is especially cool…
i wasn’t sure what was going on exactly with this drawing while i was drawing it. i just added whatever images came to mind. even after i finished, i still don’t really know what’s going on. that’s the way i usually work. most of my drawings have just a couple of figures on a blank background. this time, i continued adding things on one sheet of paper and placed them in a landscape. i wish i had a bigger paper. i could have kept going.
a couple of weeks ago, i invited a local artist, dave geary to my apartment for coffee. we’ll be doing a show together next spring at a gallery in saskatoon. so we get together sometimes to talk about what we would like to do. i’m so glad and lucky to be able to do a show with him.
dave told me about a game called “exquisite corpse“. we played the game over coffee. it was fun. you never know what the result will be.
that game must have been at the back of my mind when i did this drawing. i was playing the game by myself. i didn’t fold the drawing paper. but i imagined my mind being folded. every time i opened the skin of my mind, random images showed up. i just placed the images on paper.
my mind is quite random. my mind is everywhere, so i don’t make much sense when i talk. but for some reason, it all makes sense on paper.
no wonder i couldn’t find anything about rinpa eshidan. their name “rinpa” uses the kanji “輪派” in japanese, not “琳派”. both combinations of kanji sound the same, “rinpa”. it’s a common problem in japanese that it’s hard to know which kanji are used to write someone’s name, since there are usually several possibilities. most japanese names are chosen as sounds first (in kana, the japanese syllables) — then you find kanji to make up those sounds.
i figured rinpa eshidan’s name would be written with the same kanji as the historical art style called rinpa (琳派). especially because “eshi” is the old-fashioned japanese word for a (traditional) painter. but instead, they chose the kanji “輪派” to spell “rinpa”. i guess they did it on purpose, to show a connection to japanese art tradition and to show their own philosophy at the same time. “輪” means circle in japanese. according to their blog,
rinpa is “circle” style. it’s a group that values the connections between people. the members are big fans of hip-hop and art. they get together once every two months to perform at clubs.
how did i find out about them? through the magical mystery of the internet. the director of the rinpa eshidan videos, daisuke yamamoto, contacted me through MIXI, the biggest japanese social network site (5,700.000 members).
i joined MIXI a few weeks ago after being invited by a japanese girl who used to live in saskatoon (i found her blog online, but she moved away just before i got here). MIXI is sort of like MySpace in japanese, but the pages are not so ugly. all MIXI members have to be invited by another member. anyway, i’d been wanting to find out about rinpa eshidan, so i wrote about them on my MIXI page.
a couple days ago, i posted their video, “1 week of art works” on my blog. just the next day, that video got promoted to the front page of YOUTUBE. the video now has almost 600,000 views and people really like it. since there isn’t any information about “rinpa eshidan” in english online, my blog post shows up when people search for them. but unfortunately i didn’t have any information about them either…
…until now. after he contacted me, i visited daisuke’s MIXI page and read a little bit about him. he’s a grad student at a fine arts university in tokyo. the video, “1 week of art works” was done for his graduation project (i’m sure he did very well!). he’s obviously very talented. at the same time he sounds like a very humble person as an artist, which i like.
he said that he’s working on setting up a new website and is also working on another new video! he’ll let me know about them when they are finished. so i’ll post about them then. also, it sounds like ABC will be showing a rinpa eshidan video on TV soon (or maybe it’s already aired. i don’t know. i don’t watch ABC).
this is a timelapse video by japanese street painters called rinpa eshidan. i don’t know anything about them, but i found their video on youtube (following a link to a different painting from tv in japan) and posted it to videosift. the video is called “1 week of art works”. they painted and repainted a wall for 7 days and took photos of it all the time. i really enjoy watching their work build on what they did before. their use of lines is very stylish, and the music is perfect!
“rinpa eshidan” means “rin school painters group”. “eshi” is an old-fashioned japanese word for “painter” and “dan” means group. rinpa was a style of japanese painting from the edo period (18th century). the style was to decorate everyday items to color life itself. i like that point of view so much. it’s cool that this new group of painters has named itself after the rinpa tradition, especially since they do such new work in decorating our modern urban lives.
