Saturday 23 December 2023

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

To all our supporters and readers may the your feastive time be of peace and happiness with the new year being a prosperous one for you

Thank you

Thursday 16 November 2023

Late autumn /spring exhibition

As Japan prepares for a long winter Australia gets ready for the long hot summer, artists will continue to work producing imagery for excellent exhibitions such as this one, they will have no holidays and there is no such things as retirement, that’s how they live.

So please enjoy this exhibition

Thank you

John Cullinane

“Panic” 2023_

Oil on linen

61 cm h x 91 cm w

Diokno Pasilan

Ollie 2023

Acrylic on archival poster

690cm x920cm

Sally Douglas

Violet to Blue watercolour on paper 36 cm h x 28 cm w

Chelle Bourne

“The Gathering “ Acrylic on Acrylic paper. 210x297mm

Linda Fardoe

‘Fecundity’s Demise’
Pencil on A1 Archers paper 2023

The Riddle,

Pencil on paper

Black Lily

Pencil on paper

Peter Davidson

Monday 13 November 2023

The Sidelined Motif

Peter Davidson

The print in the second-hand shop

Kyosai rakuga 暁斎楽画 (Kyosai's Drawings for Pleasure)

(Kyosai's Drawings for Pleasure)

https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/A_1915-0823-0-175-2

During my forty years of painting there appears to have been some obvious sidelining of particular subject matter within painting and drawing (still life, household pets, flora and fauna in their natural states [meaning how they’re seen in the poetry of light /the colour of time] etc…,), it is as though such motifs have been regulated to a lesser genre within the contemporary arts and its associated museums/state galleries, and yet these afore mentioned painterly motifs historically as well as in a modern sense maintain a huge prominence within our quotidian lives.

Why dogs, cats, family portraits, garden flowers along with shrubberies that adorns one’s abode, utensils such as tea cups, pots, plates, table clothes and other ceramic wares (see link below to view Kathleen O’Conner’s Tea Time painting) now so absent from contemporary visual memory, but remain part of daily conversations and often remarked upon in everyday coffee chitchat is unusual. But was it always this way?

Some of the old sake cups and bottles collected from the second hand store Ive drawn.

Pen and ink and charcoal on 300 g paper

20.5 cm h x 17 cm w

For example, in the heavy/light industrial, fishing ports of Kobe, I often go around second-hand shops searching for unassuming old sake bottles/cups to paint and draw not only because there cheap and interesting subject matter but tend to be passionately made and seemingly imbued with all the memories humanity can muster in household, tavern and restaurant conversations whilst give me great pleasure in touching such objects, whilst looking into them with an intense gaze that might unravel something unseen through forensic rhopography (looking at the over looked) and that kind of observation for an artist is not new.

Recently when searching for old sake cups, I came across this antiquated ukiyo-e print (top) within an out-dated frame on the shop's wall, its motif was of three rabbits, immaculately drawn/printed with great sensibility. Every time I went back to that second hand shop, this drawing nagged me because it was so good. I looked at it for several months then finally bought it.

The rabbits seemed as alive today in a modern sense as they were when drawn in the Meiji period and printed. My research revealed that the artist of the Rabbits woodblock print was Kawanabe Kyōsai and as the art historian, wrote Timothy Clarke,

"an individualist and an independent, perhaps the last virtuoso in traditional Japanese painting".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawanabe_Ky%C5%8Dsai

Timothy Clark, Demon of painting: the art of Kawanabe Kyōsai, London: Published for the Trustees of the British Museum by the British Museum Press, 1993 page 16

Kyōsai is outstanding with a drawing sensibility that rivals any other greats of the art, his subject matter is often of the simple community and belonging to the household that happen in our daily lives. But Kyōsai isn’t the only one who used everyday motifs. The French painter Paul Cezanne used a common table fruit being an apple to bring change to painting as he stated here;

‘With an apple, I will astonish Paris’

https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-56-autumn-2022/the-apple-of-my-eye

And so Cezanne did his paintings march on into history and the humble table apple that caused so much change in painting has almost disappeared from museums and galleries along with many other motifs. It appears the very unassuming quotidian motifs have bought about the most facinating shifts in painting I hope it continues.

Kathleen O’conner Tea Time Painting - Art Gallery of Western Australia

https://collection.artgallery.wa.gov.au/objects/849/lheure-du-the-tea-time

Thursday 14 September 2023

Spring Autumn exhibition 2023

The season has changed and so do the colours please enjoy this latest exhibition

from

2 Dogs Art Space Akashi

the following artists

thank you

Sally Douglas

Autumn

watercolour

17 cm h x 12.5 cm w

Sally Douglas

Spring, Darlington UK

Watercolour and gouache

57 cm w x 76 cm h

Chelle Bourne

Untitled

Digital image

Kevin Robertson

Hampstead Heath 1986

oil on paper

20 x 28 cm

Linda Fardoe

Autumn Gold

Lynn Norton 1950 - 2020

mixed media on paper

17 cm w x 17 cm h

Melissa Nolan McDougall

White Horse of Wyoming ~ 2023

mixed media on colour paper

John Cullinane

The Fourth Season 2023

oil - lenin

91 cm h x 1.52 cm w

Peter Davidson

Scarecrow study in heavly industrialized Nishi ku
gouache on paper
10 cm x 10 cm

Industral Scarecrow II

pencil watercolour gouache on paper
11.5 cm x 11.5 cm

Diokno Pasilan # 111 Print on discarded books. 2023

Saturday 24 June 2023

10 Quotidian Views of Nishi Ku, Kobe by Peter Davidson 2017 - 23

Almost every night in the apartment studio I draw the Nishi ku landscape after coming back from my Akashi art space. Driving home or towards Akashi I take digital images on my iPhone as an aide-mémoire towards creating an artwork of the local landscape, here is a small selection. Thank you

Saturday 10 June 2023

Summer winter exhibition 2023

Rice planting season

Nishi Ku

Ando Hiroshige 1797 -1858

Edo period

Woodblock print 1847 - 52

Please enjoy the blog with artworks from Japan and Australia in this winter summer exhibition, thank you

Melissa Nolan Mcdougall

Dark City

Mixed media on paper

25 cm h x 20 cm w

John Cullinane

''The Romanticist'' 2023

Oil - Linen

51 cm h x 41 cm w

Linda Fardoe

Whispering Waters II

.A5, ink and gouache

Peter Davidson

Crab Study

(Kani)

Pencil, ink, Pastel pencil gouache on paper

Sally Douglas

Good Friends

watercolour ink gouache

26 cm h w 36 cm w

DioknoPasilan

Blinds Monoprint on discarded poster 910 mm h x 690 mm w 2023

Chelle Bourne

Untitled

Digital Photograph

Peter Davidson

Fish study
Pastel, ink, coloured pencil on paper
Postcard size

Shelley Cooper

Fragments recalled'

Collagraph/woodblock.

Saturday 11 March 2023

Spring autumn exhibition 2023

In Japan the Spring has come and in Australia the summer heat slowly recedes into the pleasent autumn, please enjoy this current digital show at 2 Dogs Art Space, thankyou.