NEON NIHON Acrylic 170cm x 107cm
Text from the Book
"Behind the Kimono"
"Behind the Kimono"
Melancholic, beautiful and yet festive, Neon Nihon is a painting of extraordinary depth and sentiment.
The original idea for this work came to Andy while he was travelling through Tokyo at night and saw people silhouetted against the vivid neon lights. For the artist, the city is at its most beautiful in the dark.
“There’s a totally unique and electric feeling in the air, a contagious static”
As with other paintings in the series, it is the tension between past and present that has been explored through various transitions and contrasts. Through these comparisons, Andy continues to explore building an image through constant pictorial revision, aiming towards a finished work that is both familiar and yet eludes an obvious interpretation.
The background has a dense mathematical compactness that indicates the lights of a city at night. The geometric motifs were painted through a series of handmade stencils, the advantage being a process that allows for “a felt” rather than “a realist” depiction of the illuminations. This “cubist” density pulls the eye forward into a miniature wonderland and yet simultaneously throws our gaze elsewhere so that the patterns excite the eye to dance between radically shifting scales.
Andy says “ The shift between the colossal and the insignificant, between holism and fracture is a pictorial and symbolic constant in nearly all my work. We are a curious species; we often need to be engaged by the small, the familiar and easily digested in order to see the larger meanings”.
The original idea for this work came to Andy while he was travelling through Tokyo at night and saw people silhouetted against the vivid neon lights. For the artist, the city is at its most beautiful in the dark.
“There’s a totally unique and electric feeling in the air, a contagious static”
As with other paintings in the series, it is the tension between past and present that has been explored through various transitions and contrasts. Through these comparisons, Andy continues to explore building an image through constant pictorial revision, aiming towards a finished work that is both familiar and yet eludes an obvious interpretation.
The background has a dense mathematical compactness that indicates the lights of a city at night. The geometric motifs were painted through a series of handmade stencils, the advantage being a process that allows for “a felt” rather than “a realist” depiction of the illuminations. This “cubist” density pulls the eye forward into a miniature wonderland and yet simultaneously throws our gaze elsewhere so that the patterns excite the eye to dance between radically shifting scales.
Andy says “ The shift between the colossal and the insignificant, between holism and fracture is a pictorial and symbolic constant in nearly all my work. We are a curious species; we often need to be engaged by the small, the familiar and easily digested in order to see the larger meanings”.
IDEAS AND STAGES