Itaru Shimamura
Japanese born visual artist with dreams of solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, London, Madrid, and other countries around the world, filling my life with my art, and filling my art with my life. I have no education to speak of, no vision to speak of. I'm really in trouble.
Artist Bio
Itaru Shimamura was a painter that was born in the year 1965 and hails from Yokohama. He was a resident in Yokohama for the majority of his life and had a significant interest in music before to turning his attention to painting. Shimamura drew a significant amount of inspiration from traditional themes from all around the world and drew upon a variety of civilizations in order to establish his singular and diverse approach to the creative process.
The notion of independent discovery that has become deeply ingrained at the center of our beliefs is a recurrent theme in Shimamura's body of work. His pictures seek to capture the outlines of human faces and identities while simultaneously disguising and exaggerating these features; as a result, they conceal as much as they show. The end product is a peculiar collection of faces that have been elaborately decorated but have blank expressions on their faces as they look out at viewers through eyes that have the appearance of being black holes and contain the weight of knowledge that is unknown.
Shimamura regarded his subjects as blank canvases that he could use to explore the fundamental questions of existence and the human experience. He aimed to infuse his life with art and his art with life by drawing portraits that carried the emotions of the lives they depicted. He produced portraits that carried the emotions of the people they depicted. The only things that interest him are the enigmas and uncertainties that elude him, thus he makes it a point not to let messages show themselves in his work.
Acrylic paint, colored pencils, and colored pens were the tools of choice for Shimamura's method, which was designed to produce a multi-layered, almost sculptural effect. He would frequently work on several different things at the same time, and he treasured the time he set aside for himself to rest and relax. His body of work, much like the artist himself, radiated a sense of equilibrium and emotional steadiness.
The intention behind Shimamura's paintings was for the viewer to interact with them together with the artist, rather than in spite of him. His subjects appeared to be looking back at the viewer as if to encourage them to get further closer to gaze into eyes that were hiding a wealth of information and stories but were not willing to do so. The work of Shimamura was deceptively straightforward, yet it nonetheless conveyed an undeniable gravity; the artist himself pondered the trajectory that his work would take in the years to come.