ISSEI NISHIMURA, LAYER UPON LAYER

The Japanese artist Issei Nishimura’s wildly expressionist paintings were recently on view at Heartfield Gallery in Nagoya, Japan. Several of the pictures on view were made on canvases that had been painted over numerous times with “finished” works. Nishimura is prolific — and tends to paint anything that gets in his way. Photo by brutjournal

A JAPANESE ARTIST MAKES WILDLY EXPRESSIONISTIC PAINTINGS WITH AUDACITY AND GUSTO

by Edward M. Gómez

NAGOYA, JAPAN — In a house in the northeastern outskirts of Nagoya, a large, commercial city in central Japan that is famous for its automotive and aircraft industries, and for a university that has produced numerous Nobel Prize winners, Issei Nishimura is filling a sketchbook with line drawings of mushrooms, cats, human faces, and other subjects, exaggerating their features here or overlapping multiple images there to create compositions that throb with frenetic energy.

Using high-quality, Japanese-made, spiral-bound sketchbooks of different sizes, he can easily fill more than one of them in a single day. He also makes paintings on canvas, fabric, or paper, and drawings in various media on assorted kinds and sizes of paper, including postcard-size pictures, many of which are portraits.