Merry Xmas and Happy New Year from 2 Dogs Art Space

To all our supporters out there Merry Christmas and Happy News Year for 2017 

take care and look after yourselves 

SEE YOU NEXT YEAR.

Works in Progress Paul Humphris from London

Paul Humphris with artworks in progress

Paul Humphris current praxis is about the neon remembrances of living and working in Japan, whilst walking through the endless shopping arcades of the Kansai region. If you've been through these unending mazes of shopping arcades in the cities of Japan, you will more than likely know what the neon, fluorescent sales signs are about, with the constant shop lights flickering omnipresently day and night, it  is truly overwhelming to one senses at times.

Within Humphris’s praxis there is the usage of neon pens that one can buy at many of the shops that dot the arcades, they’re not overly expensive, nor is the paper and this tends to escalate the sensation of the cheap purchases one can make from countless shopping forays into the oversupply of cheap goods.

Interestingly, Humphris creates these artworks in silence back in Britain, he creates an almost meditative praxis within his studio, to bring the remembrances experienced in Japan as clearly as he can into coloured textural traces on paper and this is curious because it has being shown the silence may well  replenish and enlarge the brain in this article by Carolyn Gregoire  Senior Writer, The Huffington Post link to article

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/silence-brain-benefits_us_56d83967e4b0000de4037004

This is a good exhibition by Humphris and one looks forward to what he returns from London with the next time he comes to Japan.

Michael Doherty - Two Dogs Art Space - Akashi - Japan

Painting by Michael Doherty

There is no doubt the response to the Western Australian artist Michael Doherty's  painting in Japan has been very positive and this is unusual because Kobe is within the Japanese Aesthetic Golden Triangle so it's a hard place to impress and this he has done.

Western Australia is Hyogo's Prefecture sister state and in as much as it is far away, it is not that isolated but it is when it comes to viewing artworks, as the Internet doesn't give you the full story, for there is scale, dimensions and the impact of the art object just to name a few. But nonetheless, exhibitions such as Dohertys that are now coming out of Western Australia are giving the Japanese audiences a live chance to experience one artist's idiosyncratic memory, and what interests him paint in that faraway terrain.

Doherty's painting are strange but odd is good that's for sure for nowadays a lot of art appears to a brand label, almost an expected taste when one visits the gallery but when viewing his images that supposed art flavour is usually shattered by the weird accumulations of objects, he desires to render in oils and that's a great system within studio praxis to achieve, being the continued search for new motifs to paint either internally or externally from ones memory.

At times when viewing Michael's painting the memory of the English romantic painter John Martin resonates within one's memory, due to the phantasmagorical subject matter he desired to paint, and it seems not dissimilar at times to some of Doherty's painting as seen below in John Martins illustration Paradise Lost. Book 3, line 365 (The Court of the Gods) London c 1827.

Doherty is fast becoming one of Western Australia's most original painters that is now getting recognised internationally and deservedly so, 2 Dogs Art Space has pleasure in bringing this current series of paintings to Japan.

Link to John Martin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Martin_(painter)

Diokno Pasilan Still Life Drawing Project

Diokno Pasilan's Still life

Motif

Image courtesy of the artist 

Some of Diokno Pasilan's memories originate from his encounters of living in the Philippines and Australia, both countries are islands, one a lot bigger than the other but nonetheless sailing boats, ships and small water craft have played a large part within their histories for survival.

The above still life by Pasilan looks playful, almost like someone is having fun by stacking the boats up to see what they might look like as a shape, the audience who gaze upon it may liken it to ships out of water, it appears at this point the artist's human curiosity starts to kick in for where does the motif start, which boat is subtracted or added to the motif's form and how does he articulate this within studio praxis. 

Why does memory perform such strange tasks of arranging what might be considered an odd array of different coloured boats and why does Pasilan draw in charcoal,  eliminating the colour, reducing the number of boat shapes to an almost skeletal form, like a fish back bone without a head or tail.

Image courtesy of the artist 

One doesn't think artists can have all the answers of their artworks, for somethings artist's create contain a certain mystery in the way they manifest themselves, from human remembrances into a drawing.  And all the text in the world isn't going to adequately explain why Pasilan has created such an image but it now floats on the Internet for the audiences engage with their memories of ships sailing through the passages of time, oscillating down ones nervous system colliding with other remembrances through human delay.

One of the nice traits of Pasilan's drawing the audience is free to engage as he has created craft (charcoal drawing) to set themselves free to travel their own oceans of memory. And in a way the drawing above by Pasilan in its engagement with the spectator reminds me of  a statement by the American Artist Dan Graham "my art is for the people" and so is Doiknos it seems.

Audience vists to Edo and Meji Ukiyo-e Master s Yoshitoshi, Hiroshige III, Toyokuni III and others at 2 Dogs Art Space - Akashi

Audience members

enjoying  the show at the extended 2 Dogs Art Space

even though it was a biotterly cold day