Jave Yoshimoto
Creating extremely brightly coloured paintings using gauche. Inspired by traditional Japanese prints and contemporary depictions of modern disasters, Jave Yoshimoto created vibrant coloured images of destruction, man made as well as natural. Using his art to create a message, he created a series named ‘Disaster’ that addresses environmental destruction.
The piece of art I have chosen is named ‘Evanescent Encounter’. I have linked this to painting. Firstly, looking at the name of the painting (Evanescent Encounter), I had to research the definition in order to have a greater understanding on the message Yoshimoto was trying to portray. The definition of Evanescent (“soon passing out of sight, memory or existence; quickly fading or disappearing”), I was quickly aware that the artist was alluding to the fact that the earth is fading/ disappearing due to the treatment of humans and the destruction we cause to the earth.
Published in 2010 (aged 36, now 46), there was no direct information on where this art was displayed or who for. However, a website named artworksforchange.com feautured the art in an online exhibition in 2020 to promote sustainability, showing how alive the subject matter still is 10 years later.
When looking at the way he uses colours and shapes, it shows his message in an extremely smart way. The main aspect of this artwork that impresses me is the block colours. In the sand on this image, he has shown a big oil spill of a brown colour contrasting the bright yellow of the sand. The contrast of these colours show the bright beauty of the earth, compared to the dirty oil that is being polluted into our oceans and causing a lot of destruction to our planet. Using block colours of different shades of grey, compared to the blood red sky they are on top of, it shows the destruction of large fires that are releasing things into the atmosphere. The colour of red/ orange he used shows a beautiful skyline, completed by the blue sea and Sandy beach which is ruined by the smoke taking up the air and highlighting that we are ruining the beauty of our earth