Hugo Kobayashi's Nothing For Something. Paintings Of Crushed Lottery Tix

Los Angeles born, but San Fransisco based artist Hugo Kobayashi, whose painting studio is in Oakland, has a new show opening at the Hang Art gallery today.

In his third solo exhibition with HANG ART, Hugo Kobayashi continues to materialize his observations of societal obsessions through meticulous rendering. He carefully explores how drastically the perception of gambling or chance has changed over the years and how its pervasive nature now causes fun to overshadow risk. Shown together, the body begs one to wonder how the scratchers’ owners were affected. Rather than implying a specific story, shown together the body leaves the viewer to wonder how the scratchers came to be.

The show, called Nothing For Something, features hyper realistic oil paintings of crumpled lottery tickets and scratchers. Each painting measures by 16" x 32" and I love every single one of them.

Nothing For Something:

Easy Go:

Losing My Cool:

Spinout:

Uneasy:

Red Ink and Blue:

In The Red:


The show runs from May 1 through May 15th. The Opening Reception will take place Thursday at the gallery May 6, from 6-8pm.

HANG ART
567 Sutter St.
San Francisco, CA 94102
T 415 434 4264
F 415 434 2603
Mon-Sat 10am to 6pm
Sun 12 to 5pm

Paintings can also be purchased online here.

About the artist:

Hugo Kobayashi's vertical canvases are filmic, skillfully rendered, and often autobiographical. A native of Southern California, he spent four years as a comic strip writer for LA View, which gave him a strong grasp of the narrative potential of visual images. He draws inspiration from comics and films, and the tall, narrow format of his work invites the viewer to read his images from top to bottom like unreeling filmstrips.

Kobayashi's goal is to combine the graphic techniques of cartooning and design with a painterly brushstroke and representational approach, crafting powerful, unified paintings that can both tell personal stories and comment on the world at large.

Born in Los Angeles in 1962 and reared in Orange County, Kobayashi has been making images since he was five. He earned his bachelor's degree in studio art from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983 and his master's degree from Hunter College in New York in 1986. Hugo has participated in exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Center, the Keyson Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael.

See all of his work at his site.

Artist Eric Daigh Sticks It To Us With His Pushpin Portraits

Born in California and now residing in Northern Michigan, 33 year old husband, father and artist Eric Daigh creates portraits by putting ordinary pushpins in posterboard. Daigh uses blue, red, white, yellow and black push pins (he sprays green pushpins black since there are no black pushpins) to create his masterpieces. Each portrait requires about 11,000 pushpins which Daigh applies by one at a time.


above: Eric and his wife Meghan, whose portrait he's created with pushpins four times.

His work took third place (and $50,000) in the Grand Rapids, Michigan 2009 ArtPrize Exhibition, has been featured on CBS this morning, was in the 2009 Communication Arts Illustration Annual and he holds the Guinness World Record for the largest pushpin mural.

Chloe and Casey:

Austin II and Cory:

Harper:

Jaia and Kimberly:

Neyla:


Potraits of Meghan, the artists' wife


Now, close-ups of each of the above portraits of Meghan.

Meghan I:

Meghan II:

Meghan III:

Meghan IV:

Self Portrait I and Self-portrait II:


The work as it appeared at Art Prize, 2009:




above: the artist in front of his work (photo by T.J. Hamilton)

A special thanks to the following folks on flickr for additional images:
Rich Evenhouse
Nancy Rae
Numstead
Pairadocs

Other artwork made with unusual mediums:

Frederico Uribe's shoelace, pencil and kicks art

The assemblage work of Bernard Pras

Portraits made of diamonds, sapphires and other gemstones:


The crayon and paper art of Christian Faur:

Artist Kimiko Yoshida And Her Stunning Self-Portraits

above: MINOTAUR BY PICASSO. SELF-PORTRAIT, 2007-2009
Archival Digital Print on canvas, anti-UV varnish, 142 x 142 cm or 59 x 59 inches


Above: Artist Kimiko Yoshida in her self-portrait titled Japonaise.

Artist Kimiko Yoshida was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1963 and left her home country, as a result of feeling the oppression against women. She now lives in Europe and has since 1995. The prolific artist has been transforming herself into various representations of herself and others in several series of self portraits (painting herself and then photographing it) since she began her career. She has turned herself into famous painters, Brides from all over the world, Blown glass letters and symbols and much much more. Over 330 different self-portraits in the last decade.

Delacroix:

Gaugin:

Matisse:

Navajo Warrior:

Pharaoh:

Picasso Torero

Quenton Metsys (moneylender):

Rembrandt:

Sheherezade:

Tiepolo:

Van Eyck:

Van Dyck:

Vermeer:

Watteau:


Her work has graced the covers of many art and photography magazines and she's received many awards including the recipient of 1st Place in the category of "self-Portraits" in the 2005 New York International Photography Awards.


above: artist Kimiko Yoshida, self-portrait

She has been so productive I can hardly show you all of her hundreds of self-portraits, but have chosen to share some of her more recent work with you here.

No one can explain these stunning and unusual self-portraits by artist Kimiko Yoshida better than the artist herself:

STATEMENT by Kimiko Yoshida, 2009

Since I fled my homeland to escape the mortifying servitude and humiliating fate of Japanese women, I amplified, through my art, a feminist stance of protest against contemporary cliches of seduction, against voluntary servitude of women, against “identity” defined by appurtenances and “communities”, against the stereotypes of “gender” and the determinism of heredity.

Art is above all the experience of transformation. Transformation is, it seems to me, the ultimate value of the work. Art for me has become a space of shifting metamorphosis. My Self-portraits, or what go by that name, are only the place and the formula of the mutation. The only raison d’être of art is to transform what art alone can transform. All that’s not me, that’s what interests me. To be there where I think I am not, to disappear where I think I am, that is what matters.

The representation of myself as a fiction mixing my Asian culture in references to Western art history is yearning for monochromy as a metaphor of effacement and disappearance, a mark of virtuality and intangibility, a symbol of infiniteness. The monochrome is a pure figure of duration wherein all imagery and all narrative are dissolved. Here, before the infinite colour, the gaze is exposed to the infiniteness of Time. This paradoxical representation is presented each time like an impossibility, a powerlessness, and a precariousness. It is this effect of incompleteness which gives the idea of a rigorous unrepresentable, unlocatable space, the idea of a space beyond the image where representation exceeds the space of representation.

My Self-portraits represent the attempt to render representation possible by seizing it at the point where what is present is the invisible absence at the heart of the image, that absence that the image makes a point of honour of making visible. The state of invisibility isn’t the point where I put myself on display, it is the point that I put on display. The state of invisibility I put on display is connected with the radical demand of art.

By giving the immaterial (the immaterial as the unnamed) an image in a series of portraits, the work of art represents what is invisible in a figure, its immateriality, before figuring itself as a figure of disappearance.

Kimiko Yoshida, a selection of some of her more recent self-portraits (2006-2009):












above: Project of a monumental wall (300 square meters/3230 square feet) gathering 154 photographs (C-prints mounted on aluminium & acrylic, 120 x 120 cm each, 48 x 48 inches each), installation 28 meters (92 feet) long by 9 meters (33 feet) high

There's a lot more amazing work to see at her website.
Kimiko Yoshida