'East Meets West' by Lauren Brevner

When I first saw Lauren Brevner's artwork, I was captivated by the intricate polychromatic layers in her portraits. Lauren has Japanese roots and grew up in a mixed heritage family, so you can see the stylistic elements of traditional Japanese art and culture in most of her paintings.

She uses oil, acrylic, and resin, and her interpretation of female portraiture are combined with a collage of Japanese chiyogami, yuzen, and washi paper on wooden panels. The paintings below were shown as part of her "East Meets West" exhibition in Vancouver last month, which also featured a couple of Chinese artists.

[h/t: Empty Kingdom]

Comments

Enigmatic Shapes and Psychedelic Patterns

To say that I love Sanagi 's work is an understatement. Looking at her art feels sort of therapeutic, and I find her drawings refreshingly intricate. They're trippy, psychedelic, and resemble something that you might see under a microscope. Not much is Googleable about Sanagi, but that's fine. There aren't many artists these days that still pull off the whole mysterious vibe, so I commend her for that. By the way... they're all hand-drawn with pen and ink.

Feast your eyes on the making of 'Heisei Mary'

This is a time-lapse video of Japanese artist Shohei Otomo drawing Heisei Mary — a naked Sailor Moon-like figure completely covered in tattoos. The highly-detailed body ink features Spiderman, Darth Vader, Hello Kitty, Naruto, Street Fighter and Dragon Ball characters to name a few. It's really satisfying to see an artist's process, the way their illustration grows and grows out of nothing. Shohei is known for his hyper-realistic sketches using ballpoint pens. Born in Tokyo in 1980, he is the son of Katsuhiro Otomo, the creator of the manga Akira . He exhibits his work regularly in Japan and Australia as well as in Mexico and France. Three weeks worth of work are sped up into less than four minutes.

Sayaka Ganz creates amazing art menagerie from discarded plastics

I could never get enough of Sayaka Ganz . The Japanese-born artist saves the planet from plastic, at the same time creates brilliant animal sculptures. Raised under the Japanese philosophy of Shintoism, she hopes to bring greater awareness to the condition of our environment through her art. When creating sculptures, Sayaka organizes the reclaimed plastic objects into color groups, constructs a wire frame, and then carefully attaches the fragments of waste until she creates the shape she has envisioned. Her work has been exhibited in many places around the globe, among them Parma, Tokyo, Denver, New York, and San Francisco to name a few. Sayaka's Reclaimed Creations is currently on view at the Asian Arts & Culture Center at Towson University in Maryland. She regularly posts on Facebook, so be sure to like and follow her page for updates.

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