It is difficult to put to words, the emotions that surface from within when viewing Audrey Kawasaki’s work. I can’t help but see parallels of her work to Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s pre-Raphaelite art, whose art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism – Bocca Baciata (1859) for example.
For those unfamiliar with Kawasaki, she is an LA based artist influenced by both manga comics and the Art Nouveau scene in which she grew up. The figures she paints captures and personifies an inner Lolita. Often a girl, She expresses a haunting and sensual melancholy that is sometimes avertive and sometimes daring.
I thought it marginally humourous to find that heavily pensive part of myself being reflected, even personified, in Kawasaki’s works. Admittedly, I am by far not as sultry as that She in Kawasaki’s works, still the renditions of Her gave me a interesting insight into the third aspect of a portrait, that of the Model who can often times be overlooked in the process of Interpretation, while that of the Artist and the Viewer is often taken for granted.
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