Japanese hare

Japanese hare, 2014

Latest print from my time at Australian Print Workshop.
It is a Japanese hare I drew from Tokyo Nature and Science Museum.

Original sketch of Japanese hare

More hare prints to come!!

Manchot Adélie

Adélie II, 2014

I did a little sketch of a specimen of Adélie Penguin in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris in the beginning of this year.
I recently turned the pencil drawing into two versions of etchings.

First of all I printed Adélie for a print exchange project with Rona Green on the theme of animals and later I printed Adélie II with a second plate to introduce new and warmer colours.

Adélie, 2014

I remember watching a TV program about Antarctica as a child and saw the image of penguins sitting on the egg in the cold wind.
Male and female penguins take turns to incubate until the egg hatch.

It left me with a somehow strong feeling that penguin parents were the same as mine, keeping me in warm and comfortable place.  

Original sketch

Muséum national d'histoire naturelle

National Museum of Natural History was a beautiful place to be with lots of different animals including extinct ones. Lots of art students were drawing from the collection too.

I hardly buy any souvenirs for myself when I travel so drawing at museums and elsewhere is a bit like a memento. It's lovely to flip through the sketchbooks and re-visit the memory of the time and the places.

I could have easily spent another entire day or two here.

I have to go back to Paris and visit the museum again, along with so many other great museums!
I love to see you again soon Paris!

Kangaroo

Kangaroo, 2013

I've always liked kangaroo's unique fascinating body.

Features such as the powerful hind legs for hopping and a strong tail that balances its body, as well as the pouch that carries the baby roo have been very familiar to me even as a child in Japan.

There is even a courier company that uses the image of roo as their logo in my hometown too, which I kind of feel strange now that I've lived in Australia for so long.

I made this drawing when I visited the Melbourne Museum mammal room with Damon Kowarsky last year.

Original drawing

Damon also made a print of a similar looking animal from Melbourne Museum collection.
They do have lots of roo / wallaby specimen there!

Damon's print 'Thylogale'

Northern pika

Northern pika

This is Northern pika I drew from Tokyo National Museum of Nature and Science.

This species of Pika is found in Northern Eurasia continent such as Russia, Mongolia, nothern Korea and also Hokkaido in Japan.
They are also known as a living fossil as they are believed to have existed since the Ice Age

Although it looks much smaller than a rabbit or a hare (you could hold a pika on one hand) and resembles more like a guinea pig, Pika belongs to the Lagomorpha order of which hares and rabbits are a part. They have the same number of teeth as that of lagomorphs and have incisors with no canines.

We call Pika Naki-usagi - the whistling or crying rabbit -  in Japan because of their high pitch call.
Male and female make different sounds and they cry even more between March and October in their mating season.


They are vulnerable to the environmental change but are not a protected species, unlike Amami rabbit.
It's probably because their biology is not fully understood as they've only been discovered in 1928.

original sketch of Northern pika at Museum

Drawing animals at museums is great, it's like getting to really know the animals.
Before I started drawing them, I knew nothing of their history, anatomy, their favorite food and how big they really are, the actual colours of their furs and so on and on.
This might sound like an exaggeration but it feels as though it's like re-uniting with my distant cousin I never met or something like that...

Anyway I adore you Northern pika.

Water rat

Water rat is a rodent native in Australia that makes their home in lakes, ponds and river.
Paddling on the surface of the water, they probably look like platypus.

They have webbed hind legs and waterproof furs for swimming.
Their distinctive flat head with small eyes and ears and white-tipped tail are quite distinctively different from other types of rodents - looks somehow more similar to otters.

detail, Water rat

Rats are another recurring animal in my work after rabbits.

It's an animal I often drew as a child too.

Maybe it's because my parents often told me I was always running around like a rat! 

My Chinese zodiac being Rat used to help my parents' claim.

I also like imagining one day small animals like rats would take over the world and make their own kingdom, or form government. 

In retrospect, many of my works like Laputa II, Kitchen and Boss Rabbit prints from my collaborative works with Damon Kowarsky as well as some imageries from my artist books, are based on this idea of small animals taking over the world.

I didn't realise it at the time of making them, but this dark thought might be in my lurking in my subconscious secretly hoping this might happen one day....

original drawing of the Water rat

This is my last print of 2012. This print as well as 5 other prints from Melbourne Museum series will be exhibited at Japan Information and Culture Centre at Consulate-General of Japan in Melbourne in February in 2013.
What a year 2012, launched earlier this year and disappeared into space like a satellite and now it's orbiting around my head!

European rabbit

Latest addition to my museum animal series is this European rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus) from Melbourne Museum specimen collection room.

Since I was a child I loved drawing rabbits, my first drawing was a rabbit and my first art project in primary school was of rabbits. I made my own cartoons and manga where a rabbit was a protagonist.
My love for drawing rabbits deepened after reading Watership Down by Richard Adams too.
It got me imagining what their daily lives might be like in the warrens. 

Original drawing, European rabbit

I didn't even know they are considered vermin in Australia before I relocated.
They cause millions of dollars of damage in crops.
It's partly because they are such prolific animals - only 24 rabbits were first introduced in 19th century in Australia and they had multiplied in number to over 600 million over the course of less than a century!! AMAZING

I often think about the world taken over by rabbits. Speaking Lapin language (created by Richard Adams), worshiping rabbit god, serving only vegetarian food in all restaurants... I'm pretty sure they would hate us here in Australia!

So I was surprised to read that rabbits are classified as Near Threatened by World Conservation Union.

European rabbit, head

 My passion for drawing rabbits has been going for a long time and I think it'll stay this way for many more years to come.

the sketchbook project

I've joined the Sketchbook Project this year for the first time.

It's a travelling exhibition that shows thousands of artists' sketchbooks across the globe.
The sketchbooks will be permanently archived at the Brooklyn Art Library.
Mine can be found on the shelves with a call number of 162A.1-2.

The Sketchbook project will travel around the States, to Toronto & Vancouver, Canada, to London, and to Melbourne!

I had a look at the blog of this project and everyone's doing such beautiful works!!

Here are some images from my sketchbook.
More images are on my website.

dooodles

it's pretty cold in melbourne, time to stay indoors and doodle...

drawing session with reptiles

Damon introduced me to Robin Wilson, his friend and also a senior curator in marine invertebrates section at Melbourne Museum, earlier this week.
Damon and I went to the back of the Museum and drew their specimen collection of reptiles.
Robin introduced us to Wayne Longmore, collection manager for Ornithology and Mammalogy.
Wayne let us look through shelves with hundreds of wet specimen in bottles.

We went to a shelf of chameleons and geckoes.

Carefully taking them out of bottles full of ethanol with tweezers and place it on a petri dish, we began to draw and draw and draw.

It was such an intense unforgettable experience.
In the room, there was this human desire to collect, label and know all things in nature.
At the same time it was heartbreaking to see everyone bottled up, and being picked up by tweezers for me to draw.

Life-long dedication and obsession.
Absolute beauty and slight madness.
Abundance and insatiability.
All in one room.

It makes me wonder what it means to know about something.



Drawing there was so intoxicatingly great, I can't stop thinking about when I can go back there and see everyone in the bottles.


Thank you so much Damon always!!
And thank you so much Robin and Wayne for making us feel so welcomed.

baby mothra

“the spirit which inhabits these places is bad, inhuman, hostile; it belongs to an exhausting, cruel and constantly accelerating machine. Deep down, everyone… desires its destruction" Michel Houellebecq, Approaches to Distress

Childhood fear

When I was a child, I was such a pessimist. I was always thinking about how the world was going to end and cried in my bed at night. Every time I heard airplane in the sky in kindergarten, I feared for WW3 and hid inside.



So I thought I needed to get gas masks for everyone in my family...



I often remember this when I'm using stinky turps and methylated spirits in the studio.
It's about time I got a proper mask to protect myself from these chemicals!

Anatomy of living things

Our Australian Print Workshop has opened from its renovation closure recently.
Because I didn't have access to etching facility, I have been only doing engravings on wood and copper.
And also I've been doing lots of ink drawings in preparation of etching when the Workshop opens.


I'm going to the Workshop next week to start making some etchings using the drawings I've done while it was closed.


These are selections of drawings I want to make etchings of.
They are all like things inside living creatures because lots of references I use are Life's Natural Library books or National Geographic magazines.


As I look at them, my dream grows...
It is to have a Wunderkammer, Cabinet of Curiosity with my prints, drawings and collections of mineral specimens!!

Weird fishes

I get eaten by the worms
Weird fishes
Get picked over by the worms
Weird fishes
Weird fishes
Weird fishes