Restful

I’m finding the art of Japanese artist Hideaki Yamanobe very restful. It has the texture and colour palette I’m super into just now. Within some of his artworks are hidden misty landscapes and forests. The viewer is invited to search for these abstract visions of these landscapes.

The artist is heavily inspired by music. He created a series of paintings called ‘Snow Noise’, which were inspired by a stage set which he created for a performance of Helmut Lachenmann’s opera ‘Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern’ in Salzburg.

I have recently started to explore the use of white in my own art. It’s surprisingly hard to make white art have any kind of depth, so I have been doing so with lots and lots of texture. Hideaki manages to do this without my heavy handed approach, using only the slightest use of texture.

Art is a constant process of experimenting and learning as I recently discovered with a piece I tried to create last week that totally bombed. The experimental process I was attempting just didn’t work but actually it has now become something else entirely that I hadn’t planned. That’s what’s so amazing about art. The plans you have about what you want to create are often taken out of your hands as you realise your tools or your medium have other ideas and you just need to go with it.

At first, I used to get annoyed that things weren’t going exactly as I’d planned because as a graphic designer I’m so used to creating my exact vision, so when my artworks did not behave how I wanted I would just take a scalpel to the canvas in temper. Now I have learned to listen to the canvas and just see where it takes me.