A million names, a million tiny objects: Tujiki Nao

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

Shintaro Kago: ????????????????????????

Shintaro Kago, as a cultural happening, is precisely in step with his times, completely in swing with the avant-garde urban hysteria of the postmodern, globalized first world. He captures perfectly our desperate attempts to make sense of a world that increasingly reveals itself to be too big, too strange and too complicated for any one of us to completely grasp - made all the worse by our contrary impulses towards progress on the one hand, and hanging on to the comfort of the familiar on the other. As a comics communicator and storyteller, however, he is miles ahead of most of his potential audience, even in Japan, famously known as The Most Comics-Literate Place On Earth. His work is put together like a cross between a Dali and an Escher: a combination of sheer absurdity and complex logical loopiness. This is true not only for the art itself, but for the stories and for the way they are told. The near-impossibility of deciphering some of his stories is one of their charms: as someone quite proud of my comics literacy, it's quite nice to not quite know what's going on in an environment in which my confusion is rewarded so well. An apt comparison might be the novelist Thomas Pynchon: Shintaro Kago's dense, complex and absurdly layered meta-meta-metafictional stories of gore, sex and cynicism convey pleasure and meaning through their texture - and they'd better, too, because the literal meaning of the storytelling is at times impossible to ascertain.

A short version of the above paragraph, sans-snobbery: WEIRD, DUDE! GROSS! TRIPPY, WOW!

A note: my inclusion of a Vice Magazine cover does not imply or in any way indicate my endorsement of said publication. I find Vice Magazine pathetic, immature and disgusting, and I hope you do too.

Artist: Shintaro Kago
Type of art: Sequential art, avant-bizarre, ero-guro nansensu, underground manga
Media: Pen and ink, sculpture, video, etc.
Time period: Contemporary
Country of origin: Japan
Motifs: Bizarre, formalist panel layout, overwhelm, gore, sexuality, absurdity, schoolgirls

On Wikipedia
On Lambiek Comiclopedia
News and comics scanlations on Same Hat! Same Hat!
Apparently, this is is Website. I don't read Moonspeak, though, so... beats me.

Stare: Oleg Dou

Oleg Dou is a photographer. For a long while, I did not realize that. I thought, to his credit, that he was a photorealist painter. But really, he's as much a digital painter as he is a camera warrior; leaving aside all the hoopla and grand high snarkity over digital photomanipulation and the "honesty" of the photograph (as if photos were -ever- facsimiles of human vision), Dou's work is a testament to the power that a well-manipulated photograph can wield. Dou's pure, inhuman-yet-emotional crazy perfect automatons with piercingly authentic eyes are more than I can handle on most days, and I like it that way, thxuvarymuchs.

Artist: Oleg Dou
Type of art: Surrealism, photomanipulation
Media: Photography, computer painting and photomanipulation
Time period: Contemporary
Country of origin: Russia
Motifs: One pale, browless white face, piercing eyes staring straight forward, and something is VERY wrong.

Dou's Website
Blog entry about Dou
Blurb on Dou from Coilhouse

Symbolism and dynamic power: Elihu Vedder

Elihu Vedder was a prominent Symbolist whose greatest claim to fame was a gorgeous, lushly detailed and graceful artist's rendering of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, one of the all-time classics of Middle Eastern poetry. His powerful, almost sorceress-like, female figures form an excellent complement to those of his great contemporary Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and are obvious older sisters to the women of Alphonse Mucha, not just in their power but in the flowing drapery of their peculiarly Aesthetic clothing. His use of light is dynamic verging on flashiness, but as I'm fond of flashiness, that's hardly a problem. In fact, his classical, neatly delineated and deeply Symbolist murals and mosaics in the Library of Congress, with their crisp colors and simple, strong light and shadow, are my favorite of his work. I'd love to go to the Library of Congress someday, not the least of reasons being to take in his images firsthand.

Artist: Elihu Vedder
Type of art: Symbolism, illustration, murals
Media: Painting on canvas, painted murals, sculpture, pen, pencil, etc.
Time period: 1800s
Country of origin: United States
Motifs: Powerful, flowing female figures, symbolic layout, bold colors and cleanly defined, high-contrast shadows, esoteric subject matter

Smithsonian Institution page featuring Vedder's entire illustrated book of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
On Wikipedia

Naive, classical, bizarre: Jean Duvet

Jean Duvet was a French goldsmith who produced series of unusual engravings with Italian Renaissance influences. Figures crowd every spare inch of his rapturous religious and mythological images, swept up in various stages and degrees of emotion or rapture. His work shows all the signs of an obsessive naive artist, not unlike some of the outsider brut artists such as Adolf Wolfli or Alexander Lobanov. Yet his obvious level of skill with anatomy, rendering, and graver's burin make him a real Renaissance master, however eccentric. It's worth noting for the benefit of those unfamiliar with printmaking that unlike a technique such as acid etching in which ground is scratched away from the plate with a needle, engraving requires the artist to actually dig into the plate with a tool; as such, the engraver is not so much drawing as he is carving the printing plate. This makes old engraving masters such as Duvet doubly impressive. Few of the masters were as eccentric as Duvet, however, and he was doubtless seen as quite the oddball in his time.

Artist: Jean Duvet
Type of art: Renaissance printmaking, naive
Medium: Engraving
Time period: 1500s
Country of origin: France
Motifs: Christian mythology, spirituality, horror vacui, crowds of figures, naive composition

Wikipedia entry
World Wide Arts Resources entry

Leo Sawaki, mytho-sexual stippler extraordinaire

Mr. Sawaki is apparently a huge fan of Ernst Fuchs, and it does show, in spirit if not in technique. His work is so soft and lush in texture and anatomy, yet the color, poses and the overall distant, difficult attitude of his figures lend his work a hard, uncomfortable edge. His anatomy is masterful, and is a refreshing contrast to the craft-averse modern "fine art" scene, especially in Japan where it's basically just a lackluster imitation of Western postmodernism. It's wonderful to see eroticism given such noble treatment.

Artist: Leo Sawaki
Type of art: Erotic, mythological illustration
Medium: Stippled ink
Time period: Contemporary
Country of origin: Japan
Motifs: Judeo-Christian religious imagery, mythology, eroticism in both the female and male forms, selective and thematic color

His Website
Page at Vanilla Gallery
Page at the Museum of Eroticism of Paris

New format! Also, Ernst Fuchs

I am a depressed lady, and that translates to erratic enthusiasm and laziness. So, as nice as my big ol' fancy bloviations on various artists were, they didn't last because when I was feeling all rotten and discombobulated I had no energy for them. To wit: I am trying a new format! I have not given up on you, dear reader-or-three, so please do not give up on me!

The new format will be simple, which is entirely the idea. It will be something I can do when I'm lazy, when I'm depressed, something that will be a comfort and not a burden. There is simply such a huge volume of good art out there that I needn't bloviate about every artist. I will provide a a few carefully-picked images by the artist, some basic statistics, a sentence about what they "do," their Website if they have one, and any other relevant links. This does not mean I will stop bloviating entirely - quite to the contrary! I may occasionally visit or revisit a particularly loved artist with a glob of verbiage, and when I do, it will be BLOATED ESSAY WITH A VENGEANCE!!!!111 However, you shouldn't expect such a thing on any sort of regular schedule or any such thing.

So, let's try it out, shall we?




My god, this guy has done everything! He founded the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, has done some absolutely astounding weird architecture, etching, sculpture, and of course his primary body of work, painting. His work combines an incredibly delicate touch and obviously comprehensive understanding of anatomy and technique with a sort of wild, almost naive impulsive visionary mysticism. Wonderful. Spiritually, he's working off some sort of Judeo-Christian framework, but it's clearly his own metamystimagickal interpretation... His buildings alone deserve their own essay, but for now, this will have to sate you. The man survived the Nazis, was friends with Dali... There's just so much to this guy!

Artist: Ernst Fuchs
Type of art: Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, visionary art
Media: Painting, etching, sculpture, architecture
Time period: Contemporary
Country of origin: Austria
Motifs: Judeo-Christian religious imagery, death and dying, mythology and spirituality, transcendentalism, surreal alternate reality

His Website: http://www.ernstfuchs-zentrum.com/
On Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Fuchs_(artist)
A fan page: http://www.ernstfuchs.com/
A bit of history: http://www.antonioroybal.com/FuchsNew.htm