Dialogues with Tradition

 
In Europe, Nara had admired the transparency and surface textures of late medieval and early Renaissance frescoes. After returning to Japan, he reflected on these and other aspects of European artistic traditions as well as the techniques he had been taught in the 1980s.

In order to achieve the subtle, stucco-like appearance he had appreciated, Nara used pastel colors and covered these with a thin layer of white paint, giving the images a luminous quality. The white veil emphasizes the ethereal atmosphere of Under the Hazy Sky, painted in 2012, the year after the Great East Japan earthquake. It makes tangible the haze which envelops the child, cloaking everything around her until it becomes indistinct and unknowable. Even the girl’s red dress, mottled with areas of vivid orange, is muted. Nara echoes the use of symbolism and narrative signifiers in Renaissance imagery by placing a green sprout in each hand of the child. This two-leafed sprout is one of Nara’s earliest motifs, featuring prominently in his work since the early 1980s. It is a small but powerful sign of optimism and hope for new life, recovery, and growth.

Another formal approach adopted by Nara, based on his knowledge of the European masters, is his deconstruction of his paintings using a captivating, energized pointillism. He painted his figures using fragmented, multiple touches of varied colors, moving away from the solid areas of pigment he had used previously. When viewing the works closely, the overlapping layers of color can be made out but at a distance they appear to dissolve into one another. The marks made by his own brush are visible and communicate the presence of the artist, adding to the power of the medium of painting.