LA Artcore

ARTIST SPOTLIGHT FEATURE:

VELDA ISHIZAKI – THAILAND INFLUENCE

LA Artcore is pleased to present this Artists Spotlight Feature with Los Angeles-based artist Velda Ishizaki, whose paintings are shown in chronological order and represent the artist's thinking and development of the past year and evidence an increasing command of paint, technique, and formal language.

#1.     Spanning this past year, Ishizaki's process took on a new purpose, catalyzed in part by the passing of her husband, and on an LA Artcore exchange trip to Thailand in the fall of 2019.

 In January 2020, I attended the Thailand Art Exchange where I exhibited and participated in numerous workshops, painting next to accomplished Thai and North American artists over a three-week period. When I painted the strips for the tapestry, I used gessoed canvas strips as they could be easily transported to  Thailand.  The painted strips were woven together upon my return from Thailand as I wanted to unify the 11 strips into one piece.  The importance of a specific color juxtaposed with another specific color is more important to me now than before. The circle remains a dominant shape along with muted geometric shapes and lines. This piece is definitely a precursor to the current works that have a more complex approach to a depth of field and varied shapes.

#2.     Upon returning from Thailand in February 2020, Ishizaki began to approach painting with an interest in letting go of the semi-representational imagery of her previous works, in favor of that which was suggestive, ambiguous, referential, overlapping, and experimental. Ishizaki here first laid out the loosely-gridded structure that defines the painting’s composition and animated its carved spaces showing a knack for a color’s and a shape’s ability to push space back and pull it forward. The alternating rectangular shapes mixed with organic circular shapes might evoke a moonlit urban landscape – an abstracted nod to Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night. The wide spectrum of color values in relation to the spacing and scale of shapes produces an active overall environment of unexpected visual interactions. This painting is an expression of structuring and balancing the intensity of feeling.

The new knowledge came from the workshops in Thailand where I watched these outstanding painters struggle with their pieces.  I watched excellent paintings get covered up or completely changed.  I loved watching the process. So I came home and copied that "process" and wasn't afraid to make a "mistake".  Watching those painters had a profound effect on me which to this day has not left me.  This painting was the very first after many "practice" paintings on paper and one practice painting on canvas. I decided to plot out the shapes in black and then "fill in" the spaces.  Much of the fill-ins were successful but overall a little rigid. I still like it. I like the overpainting and brushstrokes that were becoming more fluid.

#3-5.   In the following three paintings completed in chronological order, Ishizaki begins to discover what pictorial space can do in relation to altering shapes and their structuring lines. By allowing shapes to bleed, or discontinuing a line, Ishizaki begins to open previously prescribed spaces up to dialogue. This development stimulates optical movement to navigate between spaces whose boundaries seem to be increasingly uncertain.

 All three of these paintings have black outlines that separate the colors.  The colors are bright and flat.  There are a few secondary colors and no tertiary colors.  This was probably the reason why I was encouraged to paint the colors first, then the lines for the shapes.

#6-20. From here onward, Ishizaki discovers added freedom of her process, developing in her paintings, invigorated dialogs surrounding the conflation between shapes and lines with an increasing command of how color articulates such freedom. Within shapes are spaces that house what seem to be an artwork within the artwork–new spaces of painterly expression which continues in the artist’s current trajectory.

Ishizaki's works are on view at Union Center for the Arts

in Lydia Takeshita Legacy Exhibit: Series 1 through November 30th, 2020

© Images courtesy of the artist

Special thanks to Velda Ishizaki