Due to the size constraints of the paper I'm using these days, I'd started making large figures in parts and attaching them at the joints, like marionettes. I rather liked the results.
A fellow artist here invited me to visit her at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, where she works in the community printshop a few days a week. There was an amazing show of old French folk prints on display there, including this series of woodcut-printed paper dolls of French soldiers, cutout paper models, and these lovely, strange prints which are clearly meant to be cut up and assembled into paper puppets. Amazing stuff! I liked the graphic strangeness of the page-o-parts much better than the assembled object itself, and made a mental note of this.
I returned home that evening to find an e-mail from one of my contacts at the ACC, who'd sent me a bunch of amazing resources to pursue while I'm here, and a list of former grantees I should try and meet based on shared interests and artistic affinities. One I felt an instant connection to was Kenichi Yokono, who makes the most astounding woodblocks - not prints, mind you, but big, inked and cut blocks of wood, a cross between relief prints and sculptural objects. Among his older works were these sectioned people divided into parts (see image below), which I imagine may have started out from similarly practical reasons to the ones I began with. Again, I'm much more interested in them as "kits" or sets of modular parts than I am when they're assembled to make a finished figure. Seems like my creative compass is clearly pointing me in this direction...
I'm meeting lots of other amazing artists here, and I'll do a post on some of them very soon. In the meantime, time to go deconstruct some drawings!
(image above, anonymous French folk artist; image below, Kenichi Yokono)
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