







Tujiki Nao finely exhibits one of the traits I most prize in an artist: sitting right on the fence between "fine" art and "low" art, and confusing the viewer into not caring and just loving the work for what it is. Many of my favorite artists do this - Yoshitaka Amano, Aubrey Beardsley, Takaya Miou, Chris Ware, Charles Burns, David Mack, Francois Schuiten, Maruo Suehiro, and so on and so on. If there's any quality that consistently interests me in an artist, that's it. As an artist, she - I'm going to surmise she's female from her various pen names - skillfully evokes the master artists and nostalgic decadence of times past, the romance of traditionalism, and the subversion and decay thereof, all in the same illustration. She combines elements of randomness, absurdity, madness and subtle eroticism so smoothly and skillfully with the trappings of traditional romance and fantasy that it's difficult, if not impossible, to tell them apart. I adjust to it so quickly that her more traditional, less chaotic romance-and-nostalgia illustrations actually strike me as jarring by contrast, simply because their sweetness is so earnest and so much without complication. And that, my dear reader, is art.
Perhaps the greatest and most refreshing thing about Tujiki Nao is that she (?) is clearly genuinely enamored of Final Fantasy, Studio Ghibli, maid uniforms and cosplay. She's not a "fine" artist who's "slumming it;" there's no shame or obfuscation on the matter. She's simply got an unusually frenetic and complex imagination for the stuff, and that complexity reveals a delicious additional something under the framework. All the better.
This particular artist seems fond of using a million pen names; some of the most prominent are listed below.
Artist: Tujiki Nao AKA Tsujiki Nao AKA GREEN GLASS AKA Zatsuno Yonrou AKA Enji Kusawara AKA...
Type of art: Romantic manga illustration, doujinshi/fan art
Media: Pen and ink, brush and ink, digital painting
Time period: Contemporary
Country of origin: Japan
Motifs: Girly-girls and pretty boys, rich and saturated colors, overwhelm, traditional decorative elements, romance, nostalgia, chaos
A full Tujiki Nao image collection on Hunting The Elusive, including some doujin stationery
On Aethereality Gallery

1 comments:
Hey Anja,
You posted on my blog a while back about Americorps NCCC and I never wrote back because I have been so crazy busy and not even looking at my blog much. Anyway, I'd love to discuss it with you if you want to. My email is ssimons00@gmail.com if you want to email me anytime.
Sarah
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