BEAUTY: Mixed Media--Haruki Ogawa

Japanese painter and mixed media artist Haruki Ogawa embeds paint and industrial materials in crystal-clear acrylic resin, creating arresting little cubes of texture.

Top to bottom: Conceptual Sculpture; Object #1; Object #5; Semi Object #2 (detail); Semi Object #2; Three Dimensional Drawing #1; Three Dimensional #2

Haruki Ogawa at Frantic Gallery:
http://www.frantic.jp/en/artist/artist-ogawa.html

BEAUTY: Bunny Art and Illustrations

For spring...

Gassho Zikuri

Gassho zikuri is an ancient style of Japanese dwelling known as minka. The steep pitched roofs help snow to slide off, preventing water from getting inside and preventing the thatch from rotting. Gassho zukuri villages were listed as World Heritage sites by UNESCO in 1995 and this example in Shirakawa in Gifu prefecture will be illuminated for tourists until February 16, 2013.

"Ozu: Passageways"

Assembled by film scholar Kogonada, this hypnotizing survey of scenes and shots in halls, alleys, and passageways by legendary Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu is brief but lovely. Despite the presence of people, it feels lonely...perhaps because they are all rushing around, and we, the viewers, are isolated, watching them all pass by. Ozu was known for his style of cinematography in which the camera rarely moves and is usually positioned below the eye level of the actors.

The music is a track called "A1" from the ambient release "Stare" by Ólafur Arnalds & Nils Frahm (I have a feeling I will be posting something about this wonderful collaboration soon).

I previously posted a Kogonada video in which he surveys the late Stanley Kubrick's one-point perspective camera framing, here.

Go to Kogonada's Vimeo channel to see the other compilations he has made: Tarantino tends to shoot up at his actors from the ground, and Wes Anderson likes to shoot scenes of tableaux, hands, and tables from above.

http://vimeo.com/kogonada

BEAUTY: Photography--Natsumi Hayashi

On her site "yowayowa camera woman diary" (yowayowa means weak or feeble in Japanese), photographer Natsumi Hayashi takes charming self portraits of herself going about her daily activities while floating over, levitating in, and flying across various locales in Japan. She's just a girl who can fly, and that's anything but feeble.

Regular readers know that I am a sucker for any image of anyone floating or flying since I have had near-nightly flying dreams my entire life.

http://yowayowacamera.com/

Ensō

The Japanese word ensō may mean "circle" but the Zen Buddhist concept it represents is far larger than a single word. It contains the ideas of enlightenment, cycles, unity, time, nature, the void, infinity, and the totality of the universe itself.

Imagine for a moment that you are man primeval, on a plane, looking out around you, with little or no linguistic skills, and certainly no scientific or objective knowledge of what you are seeing. Above you is a flaming circle, giving light and warmth. When that goes away, quite regularly as it turns out, it is replaced by a great white, glowing circle that inflates and deflates over a short period of time. The two of these things chase each other in a circle as they go from side to side in the sky. At night, the sky is peppered with tiny twinkling circles. On the plane around you, berries and fruits and flowers are circular. You turn in a circle, surveying the reality around you, as your body describes the shape of a circle, and you stand as the still point, the center of this circular universe. You are in the center of the circle. The still point of the circle is where ever you are. Plants grow, are harvested, it grows colder, tiny white cold circles fall from the sky, and then soon, the warmth comes back and the plants once again begin to grow. The circle of time. And reality is an endless circle which allows that to happen.

The circle is the first, original shape, the primary form, the sound of the universe...

"Everything comes around

Bringing us back again

Here is where we start

And where we end"

--Alison Goldfrapp

What word expresses...

Welcome to my world.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

By Japanese artist Kamei Toru

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!