drawings

i’m taking part in a group show called “paper pushers” at gallery 1988 in san francisco.  i’m showing eight pencil drawings (click here to see six of them).

the show opening is tonight.  i hope my readers in san francisco can stop by and see the show!

paper pushers
an annual show featuring all works on paper

august 15 - september 6, 2008
opening reception: friday august 15th ( 7 - 10pm)

1173 sutter street (at polk), san francisco
ph. 415.409.1376
www.gallery1988.com

(the front cover)

a production manager from arsenal pulp press, a vancouver book publisher, contacted me to ask if they could use images of my drawings for the cover of their new books catalogue. each season they print around 4000 copies of this catalogue and distribute them to booksellers and university professors across canada and the US. they like to showcase a new artist on the cover of the catalogue. for the spring 2008 catalogue, they chose me.

(the back cover)

the manager who contacted me wanted to use “the upper hand” for the front cover, because they publish a lot of vegan cookbooks and the drawing makes her laugh. she wanted to use a drawing with pencils for the back cover, so i chose “my watercolours“.

i received some copies yesterday. i’m happy how it turned out. i like the background colour she chose - that’s one of my favorite colours.

tonight is the opening of the group show, “girls at play” at compound gallery. i’ll be flying to portland all day today — no direct flight from saskatoon, so we have to change planes in calgary and vancouver. i hope elijah will be happy and sleepy all day.

the curator from the gallery contacted me back in july and invited me to be part of this show. he said the theme would be “twisted eroticism”. i’ve never tried to draw anything erotic, so i wasn’t sure why he asked me. but then i remembered that some of my drawings show up on sexy websites from time to time, especially the ones with naked breasts. it’s a little strange to me that people find my drawings to be erotic, since i don’t think of them that way.

i’m not very good at drawing around a theme, or doing anything on purpose. i tend to get heavy mind-constipation worrying about whether my work will fit with what i’ve been asked to do, or if anyone will understand it. as a good japanese citizen, harmony is very important. so i end up thinking a lot about the other people and the situation, instead of just drawing what i feel like drawing.

i didn’t get much done for this show until the end of september. it was elijah’s super-fussy season around age 2-3 months. then, when i had time to think about drawing, i couldn’t decide what to do for this show.

after all that mind-blowing mind-constipation, i decided i wouldn’t care what i was supposed to do for the show. i just started drawing whatever came to my mind: first there was a girl playing nintendo wii with her breasts, then there were some roosters doing strange things (i didn’t realize what the other word is for “rooster”), then finally there were some giant hearts attached to a stump body of a schoolgirl. maybe some people will still find it sexy but it doesn’t seem that way to me. i was just trying to make myself laugh.

i’m happy the show was given the title “girls at play”. i didn’t know the title until just recently, after doing most of the drawings. it’s good that i drew the girl playing with the wii. but even the other drawings are just me playing around with my pencils, so it still fits with the theme.

harmony!

i hope people have fun looking at my drawings. if you’re in portland tonight, come to compound gallery. i’m not very chatty and don’t make much sense, but i’d be very happy if you are there.

here is the set of drawings i’m showing. you can click the images to enlarge, and go through them like a slideshow.

my original drawings can be purchased from compound gallery’s online shop (and at the gallery, in portland). i will be making prints of a few of these drawings and adding them to my online shop.

girls at play

four female artists who represent a new movement in japanese art
(show details)

november 1 - 30
reception november 1st @7pm

compound gallery
107 nw 5th avenue
portland, oregon

finally, my GALLERY is up-to-date!

this is second version of my gallery page. the first one was based on my flickr images, but it didn’t work well so i had to remove it after my site got linked from metafilter.

this new version of my gallery is based on the open source singapore image gallery. paul did the work to set it up and design it to match with my blog and shop. it looks nice and clean, and it’s easy to use.

i put up many different image galleries. there’s a collection of my favorite drawings and collections from different seasons. you can watch my style change over time, because i can never stick with one thing for very long. there are also slideshows where you can view a group of my drawings (start the slideshow of my favorite drawings).

putting my new gallery together, i found lots of drawings in my messy files that i haven’t shown yet on this blog. some of them are quite embarrassing, but now that i’m going to be a mama, i can’t be shy anymore…

older drawings from my gallery

first, really really early and really really embarrassing. this is a drawing i did with markers and color pencils back in kyoto in 1999. the japanese text says “the real me is…”. this was my best effort in shading.

that one was popular with young people but old people looked so concerned about my future.

next, something i did in 2004. i showed this with my “loud silence” photographs and useless toys at the women’s art festival in kingston, ontario — my first-ever show.

you can really see the “Action” of the New Me’s. i used this same idea a couple more times to do drawings of heads coming out of me. my mind really is everywhere.

from the same time, this drawing is still one that i like a lot. it’s my secret love-love feeling.

that was drawn with markers (and acrylic paint to decorate the edges) in about 10 minutes. can’t believe i’m showing it to so many people…

my first real show in kingston was at the sleepless goat cafe, in december 2004. i decided i should try to draw something bigger for the first time ever. i did most of the drawings and paintings for the show in about 2 and a half weeks. this was done with color pencils and ballpoint pen.

the title is “zukyuun”, which is a japanese sound effect for an explosion/blasting sound. lots of my drawings from this time have rabbits in them, or fish, or both. arts people (with degrees in fine arts) would ask me about the symbolism of the rabbits and fish. there was no symbolism, i just like drawing rabbits and fish.

here’s another one from the same show, with “rabbit-ojisan”, a middle-aged man wearing a rabbit mask. i always think of men like this to be a little sad but kind.

after that show, i didn’t do much drawing for awhile. in 2005, i did only 3 larger drawings (calcium keeps me calm, i told you, and since the first moment). most of the drawings i did were little doodles on scraps of paper, like this one.

i did a few small drawings in the fall of 2005 when i first came to saskatoon. the sushi shop where i was waitressing asked me to put up some artwork, after seeing my drawings at the fringe festival. this one is called “supper is here”.

all along, i was doing drawings on construction paper. i like construction paper because it’s colorful. here are two i drew more recently, in 2006:

i like to put these construction paper drawings in my online SHOP. the top one, “thank you rabbit”, sold to someone in california. the bottom one, “je suis vide“, is for sale now.

eventually, i got my first show in a gallery, the royal red gallery at phonographique in saskatoon. i had very little to show, so i had to draw like crazy to get ready. a lot of my favorite drawings were done in the month before that show, including my self portrait and chicken fight.

one of my silliest drawings was also from that time, which is based on a painting i did back in 2003 or so. that painting is way, way too embarrassing to show here, so this will be the end of my shameful (”hazukashii~~”) look back at my gallery. time to “hit the beach”.