I really like Katsushika Hokusai's work The Great Wave of Kanagawa. As this work was done quite along time ago, and is from a different culture I had to do some research to fully understand it- wikipedia wasn't that helpful. Although it did say that most westeners would view it wrong-"the normal, traditional way to view the print would be from right to left, implying that Hokusai’s Great Wave was designed to tumble into the viewer’s face, so to speak”. This leads your eye down into the big wave and spits it out onto Mt Fuji, does this mean that Mt Fuji is the focus of the woodblock print? Probably, considering this piece is only one out of 36 in a series called Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Mt Fuji is pretty well worshiped in Japan and I'd say this print is quite popular because of that.
In the lecture you mentioned the style of Superflat and the artist Takashi Murakami. I did a little bit of work on him last year, and really like him. I love this style as it makes for very interesting paining. I looked at the two painting's above done by Murakami and tried to view them 'traditionally'. However this did not seem to work. Murakami's work is based around the culture of Otaku, witch is pretty much gaming culture in Japan. Murakami has colaborated with other brands and people like Louis Vuitton and Kanye West.
The way Murakami lays out his work is quite like Katsushika's Great Wave. When you said it is flat and has a minimal amount of depth I emidiatly thought of Takashi's works. It seems as if it is made of heaps of different layers and the image has just been flattened. I think though, with Murakami's paintings there is no one focus, it is the overall that the layers create that is the focus. This contrasts to the Great Wave, where it seems the goal is to portray Mt Fuji.
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Great+Wave+off+Kanagawa-a0144047882 http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa
real pissd off my font and spacing is different.
ReplyDeleteDon't worry about your font spacing! What I would do is try to analyse a specific work by Murakami, like you did the Great Wave. For example, what is the iconography of the images above? Obviously Mickey Mouse comes to mind - but a Mickey Mouse that has been transformed into something a lot more savage and scary. It's a mix of cute and horrific that can be seen in a lot of Japanese pop culture. Also, obviously, while one of them is quite psychedlic, the other one not only mimics the wave of Hokusai or other Japanese prints, but is even in antique colours and possibly in antique materials - it's even a triptych like a typical Japanese screen! There's so much material here, yet you give up without even starting on it!
ReplyDeleteTX