Vernal equinox 3

Yukie Ishikawa is a Japanese contemporary artist born in Tokyo in 1961. She graduated from Musashino Art University in 1983. She has had several solo shows at Hillside Gallery (Tokyo), Nantenshi Gallery (Tokyo) in1993, and other galleries. She has participated in group shows and exhibitions, including those at the Ueno Royal Museum (Tokyo), the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Sezon Museum (Tokyo), and International Biennial of Water Color Castle of Zaprice, Kamnik, Slovenia. With her successful solo show at Blum & Poe Gallery Tokyo in 2018, how her art develops has come to international attention.
Ishikawa begins creation of a painting by tracing forms she has found in printed materials such as magazines and advertisements. The forms she picked are then enlarged and projected, deviating from the original roles they had, to serve as pictorial elements having totally different meanings.


At the center of the painting is the figure similar to the skeleton of a dinosaur or large mammal drawn by using white paint with sand mixed. In the background, the broad brush marks of black paint with different densities create a rhythmical surge across the canvas. The painting composes of three sections; upper half, lower half, and the bottom level of the lower half divided into two. The surge on the painting seems as if to move upward but at the same time to move downward. It also seems as if to pull viewers into the painting but also to move toward the viewers. Ishikawa applied the “dotting technique of the moss” used in Chinese ink wash paintings to place brush strokes along the brush marks representing the surge.