The good news is that since I last wrote about the wonderfully expressive and brilliantly realized illustrations of Tadahiro Uesugi back in 2005, many more examples of his work have been added to his web site.
The bad news is that the site is still in frames and as awkward as ever to navigate.
The domain name is simply a pointer to his original site, the main page of which is not very helpful for those who don’t speak Japanese; but you will find the almost hidden main navigation in the gray bar at the very bottom of the window. The Illustration section is the one of most interest.
Once there you must navigate by way of thumbnail images in a frame at left, that display the images in the main window at right. What isn’t clear at first is that the last image in the row of thumbnails is actually a link to the next page of thumbnails. The gallery continues this way for many pages.
However clunky the navigation may be, clicking through page after page will reward you with the wonders of Uesugi’s beautiful, spare and wonderfully composed images.
Many are simple figures composed of flat areas of color, often almost silhouettes; but my favorites are those in which his figures are presented in backgrounds that at times appear more heavily rendered than the figures; but on inspection are also composed of flat areas of color, occasionally with judicious applications of texture or pattern.
Uesugi has an astonishing command of design and color, and can pull light filled cityscapes out of an arrangement of geometric planes.
I think that many artists who might not initially find similarities with their own work would benefit from a second look. Not just illustrators and comics artists and animators, but landscape painters whose work is much more “rendered”.
Uesugi frequently manages to imbue starkly flat designed areas with a remarkable sense of atmospheric realism, simply with his astute choice of appropriate colors.
There may be texture, but there is no rendering, no modeling, no attempt to render form with anything but flat planes of color and patterns of shadow.
His use of shadow, in fact, is one of my favorite aspects of Uesugi’s work, a marvelous evocation of light told with a minimum of brushwork and complication.
Here would be a basis from which artists with more traditional and highly rendered styles might aspire to work. Imagine if you could start with paintings this simple but this complete before applying your more rendered style.
This is abstraction, not meaning “non-representational”, but abstraction in the truest sense, meaning to distill the essence of something into a simpler form.
Nice article! The paintings make me think back about France (especially the top one). Good stuff. I’ve bookmarked your site!
As synesthete I live with colors because I interwine senses, actually I see colors when I hear names and numbers. Your article shows an incredible presentation of color creating a real atmospheric realism.
Good call with the clunky website (although the artwork really is wonderful). It’s a shame how many artists don’t have their work presented very well online – how much more successful might they be, especially when being user-friendly is so important?
Thanks, Michelle. I agree completely. See my rant on How Not to Display Your Artwork on the Web.
@ Frank
It is mostly impressions of France, but Tadahiro Uésugi gives us images of San Francisco
http://www10.big.or.jp/~tuesugi/illustration/p4a11/nhkb.jpg
and Moscow
http://www10.big.or.jp/~tuesugi/illustration/p4a08/v.jpg
The only small thing that I could criticise are his bicycles :
http://www10.big.or.jp/~tuesugi/illustration/p4a09/a06.jpg
They wouldn’t support even his slender women.
Makes me want to go back to Paris! Lovely style, nice article!
Thanks for the article. I was familiar with beautiful Uesugi’s work, having arrived several months ago at his site by lucky accident. Speaking about textures and flat planes of color, I’d say it is both the result of his decision AND the fact that he paint digitally, not traditionally.
Btw, putting together simple and user-friendly site is much easier and less time consuming than one which is hard (or nearly impossible) to navigate. But, for some reason, some people opt for the latter.