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SO EXACTLY WHAT ARE WE UP TO HERE?
WELL WE’RE INTERESTED IN FORMS OF ART AND CULTURAL EXPRESSION THAT BREAK THE MOLD; THAT ARE FRESH, DIFFERENT, EXPERIMENTAL, DARING, AND DEFY FAMILIAR LABELS; AND THAT, FOR ALL THEIR INNOVATION OR FAR-OUT FORM, UNABASHEDLY CELEBRATE AND REAFFIRM THE HUMAN SPIRIT.
SOUND GOOD?

Issei Nishimura, “Makanai ryōrijin” (“Catering Chefs,” 2021), acrylic paint, acrylic gouache, black gesso, spray paint, coffee, beeswax crayon, and oil pastel on linen, 35.8 x 57 inches (91 x 145 centimeters).
ISSEI NISHIMURA: UNTAMED PAINT

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.

Issei Nishimura holding a binder containing a selection of some of his smallest-format drawings, each one about the size of a postcard. Photographed at the artist’s home in Nagoya, Japan, in the summer of 2019. Photo by Edward M. Gómez
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