Murakami Takashi

Subject matter: The mood that this image creates is really funky and fun. The use of extremely bright flat colours makes the image seem cheerful. I don’t think this has some sort of message behind I think it’s just his passion for cartoon like characters which he turns into amazing art work. The subject matter of the art work itself is all about colour I think, and also about the cartoon characters.

Technique: This art work was painted with extremely bright and different colours. Every object is outlined thinly in black. I think that’s really needed to separate the colours as there is so much going on with this picture especially with all the flowers behind the two anime like characters. Murakami Takashi did not use any tonal range so the image looks really flat. But it works this way as its 2 dimensional. Although the colours are flat there is some depth in the image such as because of the small flowers in the background, the two characters are in the front which makes us clearly see that the characters are closer. Some flowers in the background are overlapping each other which once again implies that some of them are smaller some are bigger. In this art piece there are cold colours such as green and blue but also warm colours such as pink, red and yellow. All the colours however seem to be really bright and light. The paint that was used is probably thin because the colours look really flat so the texture is smooth. The subject is at the eye level.

Artist career: Murakami Takashi was born in Tokyo in 1962. From an early age Murakami was really interested in manga and anime and had a dream of working in anime industry one day. He went to Tokyo University of fine arts hoping to get skills to become an animator although he found something that he liked which was a traditional style of painting. He works in fine arts media.

Opinion: I really like his work. I think it brings joy and it’s hard to think negative of such artwork. The bright colours and different range of them really works well in my opinion. I chose to talk about this artist because his work inspires me although my dream isn’t to be an animator I really like what he does and the flat colours that he used to paint this.