Posts Tagged ‘Modigliani’

As anyone over the age of 22 can tell you, discovering your passion or dream is only half the battle.  Then you’re responsible for actually doing it, which isn’t always the easiest thing to do.  There are social pressures, your surroundings, fears, and a range of other factors that can hold you back from doing what you love.  One thing the movies have taught us, though, is that it’s never too late to just go for it. 

Yozo Abe has one such story that will hopefully inspire the artist or art collector in you.  Born in 1958 in Nagoya, Japan, Yozo has always harbored a love of and talent for painting.  Coming from a traditional family, however, meant that his responsibilities lied in taking over the family business in construction.  Of course, running the family business left little time for fostering a great love of painting until he reached his forties – a time when many other men would have simply bought a sports car.  Yozo reconnected with his passion for painting and discovered a multitude of techniques, styles, and subject matters.  Since then and over the past decade, Yozo has made great strides in his art and has now decided to bring his work to a new audience – the United States.   

Impressed by American views on art – more casual than in his native Japan – he feels that an audience here would respond well to and understand his work. With a style reminiscent of Picasso and Modigliani, his works have a bold, colorful palette and a sensual feel.  The pieces seem familiar and warmly welcoming with no sense of pretension to be found.  He pays homage to a woman’s curves and to the desires of everyman in a most creative, respectful way.  Then, by painting early in the morning, Yozo ensures that he’s able to introduce a true dreamlike state onto each canvas.  As a result of working with oil paints in striking colors, his pieces have innumerable layers that could each tell their own stories – dreams and desires develop into exactly what he was looking for. 

With plans to start by showing his work in Los Angeles galleries, Yozo is a study in what it will take to start fresh in a country not one’s own.  The work may very well speak for itself, but as we all know many a talented artist has fallen by the wayside without the right timing, luck, or even drive.  Having spent many years focused on his business with a love of art always in his mind, I’m positive Yozo has the drive.  He surely also has the talent.  And I truly believe that time is on his side.  The style of his work connects to a place in the viewers mind where beauty, passion, and even (as cheesy as it may sound) joy live – which is to say that he connects to a place in his viewers that never goes away.  Like many greats whose works hang in great halls and great homes, Yozo seems to know, through his painting and likely his life experiences, what we will like to look at for a long time to come.