Ghost Stories by Audrey Kawasaki

About

‘Ghost Stories’ connects with Kawasaki’s sense of spirituality, and that which is bizarre, mysterious, and weird which has a peculiar allure to her. The artist has always had a fascination with stories of ghosts, the paranormal, and the macabre, which is now hauntingly expressed through this beautiful new body of work.

Kawasaki is a world renowned Japanese-American artist, born and raised in Los Angeles, and currently living in Norwich, UK. Kawasaki grew up reading Japanese manga comics, which inspired her to draw from an early age. She started taking after-school fine art classes at Mission Renaissance in her late teenage years. There, she learned the basic foundation of drawing and painting. She started professionally showing at various art galleries in the US and internationally since 2005. Having moved to the UK from the US, Kawasaki became enchanted by the rich history of her new surroundings. ‘Ghost Stories’ has been inspired by her local city of Norwich and its historic architecture, which Kawasaki enjoys exploring and thinking about the many lives that have passed through them over the centuries.

Kawasaki’s work conveys the mysterious intrigue of feminine sensuality. Her seductive, uninhibited female subjects are painted with delicate beauty and provocative, direct eye contact. Their graceful gestures and ghost-like features carry mysterious expressions of melancholy and longing. Kawasaki’s paintings begin with a pencil drawing on a wood panel, focusing particular attention to the line quality and flow, which comes from her admiration for Art Nouveau and Japanese graphic arts like manga. Acrylic is then applied over the pencil, and followed up with oil paints for colour and refinement. Using thin transparent layers, Kawasaki gradually builds up coats of colour washes in oil, often leaving space for some of the original wood grain panel or pencil markings to come through.

"My painted women are like ghosts. They are fictional, ethereal spirits/phantoms/apparitions. They are fleeting visions only captured in my work, fuelled more by impulse and instinct when it comes to the subject matter. ‘She’ tells me to draw her like this, and then I go along with her request, I show up at the studio to work and make progress until she tells me, “Ok. We are done here”. I am her obedient servant. I give her my time and effort until it pleases her. There are certain moments in the drawing and painting process when I feel extra excited and pleased, as if she sings and is finally content with my efforts. She shouts “Yes! Yes! Yes!”. I guess in a way I work for her praise and approval. This is how I prefer to make sense of it all. To separate myself from her, and to romanticise this strange relationship with my women.” - Audrey Kawasaki, 2023