Ikenaga Yasunari
It is right to wonder at the value, or even reason for Art Education, when a painter Ikenaga Yasunari’s caliber reveals his work to be the self-taught result of, simply, an autodidactic spirit with a deep love of painting — and, we might also assume, a deep love of women. Born in 1965 — in Oita prefecture, Japan — Yasunari lived the majority of his post adolescent years starving, closed off in the hermitage of a small second storey Tokyo flat: all his time, and all prospects of a full-time job or full belly, had been duly sacrificed in pursuit of learning the methods of old Bijin-ga painters — “bijin-ga”: prints of beautiful women. Some belated respect was given to Yasunari in 2014, with the publishing of his first art book — “The Happiness of One Hundred Nights Thinking of You” — his reputation continues to grow at an undeservingly slow rate, yet this doesn’t seem to impact Yasunari much, as his primary love continues to be painting, not any of its glitzy concomitants.
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Complexely Simple
The immediate impression is somewhat paradoxical: a Klint-esq pairing of complex patterns and details with a subject and environment of ultimately shallow dimension. Yasunari’s allegiance to the old Ukiyo-e prints — where the flatness of the foreground is contested only by the flatter, single colored background — is here made most clear. The bodies of the featured women are, as a result, vague in their composition. The complexion of the skin is that of the texture of the paper; there is little grading or variation: within the outlines and contours of body, color stays static and singular and scant in shadow. Really, when it comes these women — specifically, those semi-nude women clad in kimonos parted where breast and loin become visible — it is only the nipple which serves as a point of reference between naked flesh and naked flesh; the Plump, Stout or Buxom of a typical bust is, in Yasunari’s women, only a presumptuous quality, gleaned by the two curved lines of ostensible cleavage, where one half of flat chest is separated from another of equally ill defined roundness which barely manages a successful mapping of collar to breast, and end of breast to start of stomach below (this is no criticism). Perhaps this is why, despite Yasunari’s inclination towards eroticism, there are so few Nudes in his work; the body is only a pretense so that a kimono may be painted around it, or simply as a pedestal for the face in all its complexity — our main attraction and his true interest. It does seem that all of Yasunari’s inspiration stands reserved for detailing this one specific loci. It is a tradition of Japanese erotic art to save all one’s hair drawing energy for that which frames genitalia — head hair of disappointing simplicity is often the price paid for the rendering of each individual pubic hair — Yasunari seems to break the mold, however, as the precision of the hair found on the head, and even on the eyelashes, manages a win in competition against that found around the vagina. Keeping in line with the theme of simplicity and complexity, the colors all fall within a certain spectrum of earth-brown, earth-blue tones. Yasunari will dye his canvas (linen cloth) brown, using dirt washed with hot water, then recoated with ochre pigment — obtained from a similarly natural source —resulting in a flesh-like color, then used as the foundation for all visible skin.
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