Come out to a gallery in Soho, New York, on Saturday afternoon and purchase art for your home for a good cause. The one evening event Dear Japan has been organized by a group of Japanese artists who live in New York. It features 170 illustrators and fine artists, and all the works are $200 or under. It’s a small portion of what most of the participating artists would normally sell their work for. Of course, I am donating for this good cause, too.

Dear Japan
June 4th, 2011, Saturday 4-8 PM
Purchase by cash or cheque.

Art Connect New York Gallery Space
491 Broadway, 5th Floor
New York, New York 10012

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Three illustrators from vastly different backgrounds — Sam Weber (Canada), Yuko Shimizu (Japan), and Tomer Hanuka (Israel) — are meeting at the crossroads of a distinct American aesthetic to examine their new-found artistic voices through personal mythologies, broken narratives and remixed identities. Each of the illustrators featured as part of BLOW UP (running at New York’s Society of Illustrators until October 16) created new works to be shown for the first time in this exhibition.

I love the bold use of colour and playful sense of composition in the work of New York-based illustrator Yuko Shimizu. This one in particular is giving me a sudden urge for triple maple and walnut ice cream, with a generous splash of chocolate on top.

I love the bold use of color and dramatic thematic overtones that characterises the work of New York-based illustrator, and Lost At E Minor contributor, Yuko Shimizu. This award-winning piece was for Microsoft’s Ultimate PC project, in which artists were asked to create series of five personal works using their PC instead of their Mac to showcase in Microsoft’s new experimental art site.

As part of the Robin Hood Foundation, a charity organization whose mission it is to fight poverty in New York City, Lost At E Minor contributor and in-demand illustrator in her own right, Yuko Shimizu — in collaboration with designer Stefan Sagmeister — recently completed an eleven panel mural at PS96 in The Bronx.

We spoke to Yuko about the project, which took two and a half years to finish, and asked her how she got involved with it in the first place: ‘I had been admiring Stefan Sagmeister’s work and, even more so, his work philosophy, for a long time. So when he got hired to create a mural in a public school library, he thought it should be illustrated. I don’t know how he picked me, but he contacted me to work with him. How can I say no to my hero? Also, after working for a while in the field of art, most of us start thinking, “how can we give back using our skills?” This project gave me a good answer. Often times, a rewarding feeling comes more with charity work than with payment’.

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My friend and artist Emily Gearhart just sent me this video. It’s probably the funniest video I have ever seen. Oh, what a great way to remind your friends to vote. You can customise it with your friend’s name and then send it out them. Fun, fun, fun.

I’ve worked with the brilliant New York-based illustrator — and Lost At E Minor contributor — Yuko Shimizu remotely for some years now. But despite the fact that we live in the same city, we’ve only met up once — at a group exhibition that she was a part of at a Chelsea gallery. Even then, I could tell she was as vibrant and colourful a personality as her illustrations suggest. Which is why it’s so nice to see these photos from deep within her studio space; to get a window into the environment in which her creativity is unleashed.

We checked in with one of our favourite illustrators, Yuko Shimizu, recently: How are you dealing with the mugginess of the New York summer? ‘I am originally from Tokyo, where humidity is a lot higher in general, and summer temperature can go a lot higher’. ‘Don’t get me wrong. I sometimes cannot stand the New York summer (especially waiting for the subway at the stations!). But when I feel that way, I think of the Tokyo summer, where you step outside of the air conditioned building and you feel sweat running down your back immediately, and I am at peace with it’. Is is fueling or stifling your creativity? ‘I don’t function well when it is humid, so I stay in my studio with the AC on’.

New York-based illustrator, and regular Lost at E Minor contributor, Yuko Shimizu is heading to Philadelphia to give a lecture and attend the opening of an exhibition of her illustrations at The University of The Arts this Thursday. The University of The Arts is the only university in America dedicated exclusively to the visual, performing and media arts. The show will feature about twenty of Yuko’s illustrations as well as some of her original drawings and sketches. She will also present a lecture for about an hour and half in which she will talk about her work and give advice to aspiring illustrators and people interested in illustration. The lecture starts at 1pm at the CBS Auditorium with the reception on at Broad Street’s  Von Hess Gallery between 2.30 and 3.30. If you’re in the area, it would be well worth getting along and checking it out.

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I was rulking (half-run; half-walk) through the inner city a little while back, killing time and thoughts with mindless banter (yes, one way conversations have their benefits) when I noticed a grown man crying hysterically on the opposite side of the road to me. He was probably in his early-thirties, slightly disheveled and seemingly oblivious to his surrounds. It was a disconcerting sight – raw emotion revealed in the full glare of the midday sun. But who knows what calamitous news he may have just received; what heart wrenching decision had just changed the course of his life. Part of me wanted to turn and run as if I’d never seen it. A bigger part of me wanted to go up to him, give him a hug and open my heart up to the truth of his tears. In the end I did neither and simply continued on down the road, leaving him to his grief; and his grief to my conscience. Yes, tiny imperfections, a window to the soul. The Ancient Greeks knew it, the Babylonians knew it. Heck, even Leonard Cohen knows it. ‘Ring the bells that still can ring’, he said, ‘forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’. It got me thinking about the austere nature of modern society, about our collective shudder at the sight of unbridled emotion. I pass a thousand strangers every day, each one of them as faceless as the next. But perhaps I should pause for a moment and look them square in the eye, slowly peeling away their onion layers of skin to reveal the living, breathing person within. [illustrations by Yuko Shimizu]

A few weeks back, I went to a show at the School of Visual Arts Gallery in Chelsea, New York to see an exhibit called Super Phat. It was a multimedia art presentation featuring the work of over 40 of SVA’s Japanese alumni and alumni living in Japan. Among them were two large and gorgeous drawings by my friend and studio-mate, Yuko Shimizu. Her work never fails to astound me. Yuko’s pieces entitled The Wild Wild Chase and The Rodeo Drive transplants her striped swim-suited characters into a Western inspired realm where they are met by horned and furry hooved monsters. Magnificent. [read an interview with Yuko Shimizu and check out the posts she has written for Lost At E Minor]

Says New York-based illustrator Yuko Shimizu on the work of artist Marilyn Minter: ‘I was extremely lucky to be able to study fine arts with Marilyn Minter as my professor before she became too busy and stopped teaching the course. She was brutally honest about students work, which sometimes made me cry but made me grow like nobody else did. I owe her a lot’.

‘I love the fact she has not changed at all; she’s still down to earth, funny, and serious about good work, both her own and her students. Her photography and photo-realistic enamel paintings invariably borders that fine line between beauty and ugly. She says there are images that look good as photos, and images that don’t look great in photos but look great painted’.

New York-based Japanese illustrator Yuko Shimizu has been featured on Lost At E Minor several times over the past couple of years. I love the sense of drama her work conveys, the apparent colour clashes that somehow gel despite pre-existing rules about their compatibility. We checked in with her to see what she’s been up to of late: ‘I just came back from a week in Georgian Bay in Canada. No internet, no cell phone reception for a week. It was fantastic! Now I am getting ready for a group show at Visual Arts Gallery in New York that opens in September. I am creating two new 40” x 60” drawings. I’m also slowly refurbishing my website here and there’. What other creative medium — outside of illustration/art – do you most get into? ‘I love books. I admire writers who write really well about characters that are so different from who they are. My favorites are Haruki Murakami and Yukio Mishima. I know, I always say I hate Japan and everything Japanese and … look at what I am doing! I am reading Hotel New Hampshire [John Irving] and Kitchen Confidential [Anthony Bourdain] right now, both of which are so interesting and fun to read in completely different ways. My studio-mate Marcos Chin, his boyfriend and I have a mini-book club now, and we often read the same book together at the same time. Marcos’ boyfriend had already finished with Hotel New Hampshire and complained I am too slow! I have to catch up on my readings’. If you teleport yourself anywhere in the world right now, where would it be and what would you be doing? ‘I am in Sesimbra, south of Lisbon, in Portugal, watching the ocean, eating fresh seafood and drinking white wine. And I don’t even drink, usually!’ Do you ever get illustrator’s block, and if so, what do you do to overcome it? ‘The older we get, we learn not to struggle when suffering. When you get drowned, the best way is to not panic. When you have a block, the best you can do is walk away and do something else. Get a good night sleep, don’t think about it’.

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