An Augusta link to a Japanese pop culture phenomenon

At the same time the show was being installed at the Brooklyn Museum, Augusta artist Tatiana Klacsmann was working behind the scenes on other Murakami projects at the Long Island City, NY studio/office of his Kaikai Kiki production company. She spent several months there as a studio assistant, and because she signed a confidentiality agreement, she is reluctant to divulge details of her assignment. However, an article by Erica Orden that appeared in the New York Sun on March 26 gives us a picture of the process:

“Each day, Kaikai Kiki’s artists, mostly 20-somethings outfitted with skinny jeans and iPods, can be found in the first-floor studios carrying out instructions sent from Mr. Murakami’s office in Osaka every morning. Each painting begins with digital renderings made from Mr. Murakami’s sketches by a design team in Japan. The renderings are sent to artists in New York who print them on acetate to make silk screens – as many as 40 a painting – which are then aligned by lasers and screened onto canvases.  But that is, literally and figuratively, just the big picture.

“The artists must also mix paint according to color charts specific to each work, or, even, to a small portion of the work….  A single painting can require as many as 3,000 colors. Each step of the process – every acetate printout, every silk screen, every color – must be checked for accuracy by a supervisor, and finally by Mr. Murakami, who receives scrupulous photographic documentation of the factory’s progress at the end of each day. And that’s before anyone picks up a paintbrush.”

For Tatiana, the job meant long hours of intense, precision-driven work. She was one of a team of 17 studio assistants who worked in shifts around the clock.  One Murakami piece in the studio at the time she was there was destined for Art Basel in Switzerland, a top international show for contemporary art.

Working for a Japanese pop culture icon and one-man global industry might seem a strange tangent for Tatiana, who is a Yale graduate with honors in art and classical Greek. She said she wanted to work for Murakami because she knew “it would be a very active and exciting time to be there with the opening of the Brooklyn show and the coming of Art Basel.” And what did the experience bring to her art? “In terms of my own working methods, my medium and subject matter differ from Murakami's, but I was influenced by the high level of organization in the studio,” she said. 

There’s more information about Murakami’s Brooklyn show at www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/murakami, where you’ll find images and a slideshow of the installation of the massive exhibition. Both the exhibit and the online slideshow will close July 13.

On a different note, Tatiana is happy to have one of her own works from her “Chimera” series on exhibit in the Spring Show at the Pen and Brush Building in New York. Pen and Brush Inc. is a 113-year-old international organization for women in the visual, literary and performing arts, based in a historic townhouse in Greenwich Village. That show closes June 22.

Next, she heads off for her second summer at the Vermont Studio School, where she will be preparing an entry for a national portrait competition. She’ll end the summer with another artist’s retreat at the Hambidge Center in north Georgia before heading for Christie’s in London in the fall.

Augusta artist Casey Cohoon is in the spotlight this month as a finalist in the National Competition for Figurative Sculpture sponsored by the National Sculpture Society in New York. The NSS, founded in 1893, is the oldest organization of professional sculptors in the United States.

The competition will take place June 16-20 at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut.  This year, there are 13 finalists. The actual competition begins when the finalists enter a large studio where there will be a live model. Until that moment, they will not know whether the person will be young, old, male or female.

Then for five days, six hours a day, they will work to create realistic sculptures (no more than 3 feet high) of that model. At the end of the competition a panel of judges will arrive to critique the works and select the winners. Contestants do not know who the judges will be until they appear.

Open to emerging sculptors ages 18-39, the competition venue rotates among the Lyme Academy, the New York Academy of Art and Brookgreen Gardens in South Carolina.  Judges are not connected with any of the sponsoring institutions. The finalists are chosen from portfolios submitted by applicants from around the country.

Casey already has one of these competitions under his belt, as he was also a finalist in 2006. He knows from experience that the judges will be looking for anatomical accuracy and continuity of line, for work fully realized right down to the toes.  In the past two years, he says, he has been doing a lot of sculpting, giving him broader experience, and he makes sketches almost constantly. So he feels he is ready for the challenge.

The young artist began sculpting in his freshman year at Westside High School, and went on to earn a B.F.A. degree from the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2007.  He had work included in the B.F.A. Regional Exhibition at Boston University in 2006 and was selected for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Sculpture Competition that same year.  Last summer, he had a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, where in a classic “small world” encounter, he met another Augustan, Tatiana Klacsmann.

“Finding one’s character through clay, and pushing it to expose an innermost being, is for me the most rewarding aspect of sculpting,” he said.  “I am intrigued by how much information a simple piece of clay can reveal.”

An example of his work can be seen locally at Zimmerman Gallery on Broad Street.