Change of Direction

This blog is now going to be highlighting the things in my life post-japonic. However, there is bound to still be Japanese influence in many of these things, so I'll be bringing up alot of things connected in one way or another to Japan in nearly ever last post, I am certain. I'll be pointing it out for you all too.

The first thing I'd like to share with you all are the works of three of my favourite artists. One is Japanese, one half-japanese, and one completely un-Japanese. They are, respectively:

Shina Ringo: a Jazz artist from Tokyo, Japan. She is know as being quite strange, even among musicians or jazz performers. She has done covers of songs in at least 6 languages, which is 5 more than most people from her continent ever manage in the music industry. Not only that, she does them well, with pronuciation that defies the idea that being Japanese makes foreign pronuciation unattainable, as many on the subcontinent seem to believe (or fear. People will believe things they either wish to be true or fear...Wizard's First Rule, didn't you know? But I digress.) Shina can play almost every instrument I can think of in the Jazz world, and has written and recorded music from not only jazz, but also soft/hard/alternative rock, some strange military marches turned cute (I know, it's strange), piano pieces, and plenty of other genre-defying creations of her own. Not only does she have an incredible jazz voice, she also can play most of her instruments and is a great writer, so she's basically a one-woman musical army. Recently, what with being a mother, a full time composer, full time musical performer, and just being highly in demand for her time she decided to call alot of it quits and just join a rock band. It's still rock unlike any other due to her influence as the group's singer, and she is still part of the writing process, but it's transformed her style in new and interesting ways, although it isn't as various as it was when she was on her own. In any case, the name of her new group is "Tokyo Jihen" Which roughly translates into "The Tokyo Incidents" in English.

The second artist, Jacob Wellman, was actually a roomate of mine for a year. You know how people will talk about "deep" art? Well, Jake himself is alot like his art. We used to say that there was a deep Jake, but that beyond that was a "deeper" Jake, and that there was, quite probably, a deeper Jake under that. His works always fascinated me, because although they generally hold no recognizable shapes as representations of 2d or 3d objects in the form of a scene, his instead generally use shapes and colours that have a "feeling" that is almost impossible to explain. At times, he would bring works back to the dorm, and I would look at them and sort of "see" his experience. I could look and tell him the emotions I was feeling expressed in the piece, and even see the influence of things such as him having been raised in very urban areas, dispite the fact that there literally were NO shapes that the eye would encounter outside of the creations of man. But no matter how expressive his paintings are about life as Jacob Wellman, they still embody a sense deeper than what it is to be human: they are about being itself--what is is to be a creature on this Earth. This may be related to his beliefs in Zen Buddhism. His blog that he recently created to share just a few of his hundreds of sketches, paintings, and other more 3-dimensional works, can be found here.

Finally, I have no idea where this guy came from, but I recently found this selection of art online. Although some of his other stuff doesn't do anything at all for me, I would still suggest his crayon-carving art for viewing, if not for attempting. I would have broken (and this is just an approximate number) 351,492 crayons by the time I could have done this myself.

Approximately.