Saturday 29 January 2022

Friendship ended with....

 whoever my previous favourite sculptor was. No idea really, Hepworth? Some un-named Medieval gargoyle-former?


Because now Akishi Ueda is my best sculptor




Twitter isn't completely awful, I actually knew nothing about this artist, not even their name, but was drawn in through the algorithm showing images, links and suggestions presumably based on people I was following. 



(This guy in particular reminds me of myself.)





From the links and images I saw an art book was being made and that it was not horribly expensive, and so a purchase was made and thence utterly forgotten about while the book slowly germinated and then slipped across the seas.




Ueda (Akishis?, I can never get Japanese names the right way round), work runs from the beautiful nightmare to the somewhat sugary, probably you can guess which arc of that I prefer more, but all of it is dreamlike, somnolent, the halls of Morpheous open up and processions come forth, all quietly intent upon their own journeys and purposes.




Children dreaming of kings or kings dreaming of children, comfortable terrors.




Many such snouted creatures, they remind me of Baku the dream snaffling monster.




Many Fairytail Riders, creatures like men riding wonders sprung from the impossible paradoxes of a peasant grandmothers descriptions of an impossible beast, yet made real.




Or common figures and characters from parallel-world Fairytails, or visions of us in the dreams of the impossible creatures that might exist obverse to us across the wall of sleep.




There is an instagram here

And you can get the book..



5 comments:

  1. Beautiful, thank you for sharing.

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  2. Grotesque is easy to do.
    Elegant beauty aint.

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  3. Thank you for sharing this! These are the exotics for adventures on the Moon, deep in the sea, miles below the earth, or lostin the fairy woods.

    Wonderful!

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  4. In other Japanese sculptor news, the SCP wiki finally removed Izumi Kato' piece Untitled 2004 as its art for SCP-173. Something about using it for commercial purposes, which the original agreement prohibited, and Kato never really liking the use in the first place.

    I'm not entirely sure if it's a "nerd who writes for a fandom paracosm wiki" thing to take an image of something ambiguous/enigmatic and interpret it as a monster that snaps your neck if you blink. Maybe that sort of flattening, or nailing down, is necessary to imagine a thing you can dramatically interact with. Maybe it's a more general matter of familiarity breeding contempt (or at least eroding mystique). In any case, it still feels like a (very mild) loss, like the memory of a dream after you've tried to explain it to someone else.

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