Maiko Kanno “Drifting Pages”
I visited Maiko Kanno’s solo exhibition “Drifting Pages.” The venue is “AL” in Ebisu.
Based in her hometown of Sendai, this is her first solo exhibition in Tokyo in about two years.
Maiko Kanno’s works, which take young girls as their motif, along with the narrative flowing behind them, invite a wide range of interpretations and enjoyment depending on the viewer.
At the venue, the works are broadly divided into three categories as follows. In total, 33 pieces along with goods and various items are on display.
- Acrylic paintings
- Pencil drawings
- Acrylic + pencil drawings * a first attempt
[1] Acrylic paintings
This exhibition is a new-work show based on a new attempt: “creating works inspired by stories.”
Many works quoted from “Andersen’s Fairy Tales,” “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” “The Legends of Tono,” and others are on display. The title “Drifting Pages” is said to embody the drive to “expand the world of the paintings, as if pages have fallen out of a book and are drifting somewhere.”
Maiko Kanno’s acrylic paintings shine with skillful color use and technical mastery. The fine grain of the paint is beautiful, and seeing them in person is likely to strike a chord with most viewers.
[2] Pencil drawings
Unlike the acrylics, the pencil drawings are monochrome works with a taut impression, expressed solely through shading. The motif is female, but expressed in pencil, the impression changes considerably.
Kanno’s work that received the Heisei 30 (2018) “Sasaki Kizen Prize” of Tono City was a four-part pencil drawing series titled “Stargazer” (on view at the venue; sold). The pencil drawings let you feel Kanno’s draftsmanship.
When drawing in pencil, she reportedly uses many different pencils in different areas. For backgrounds, she uses “STAEDTLER,” whose strong bluish tone can express depth. She says she uses 15 to 20 different pencils per work.
[3] Acrylic + pencil drawings
In addition to acrylic paintings and pencil drawings, a new series that combines the two was also on display.
To fuse acrylic and pencil — materials that don’t work well together — she pastes paper on a wooden panel to create a support, sprays a primer as a base, and works the surface with sandpaper. The color palette is also chosen to make the monochrome of the pencil drawings come alive, giving the works a distinctive atmosphere.
The image below, “Easily Untied Dress,” is the debut of this series. Its high level of completion is what prompted her to expand into this series.
“Easily Untied Dress” is also used on Kanno’s business cards. This series will be worth watching going forward.
新しい名刺ができました。鉛筆とアクリルを併用した新作と、箔押しのバランスがかわいく仕上がったと思います！4月からフリーランス になった夫、阿部拓也https://t.co/J7KyhtI4yoのデザインです。
（※携帯番号記載のため配布はしておりません。） pic.twitter.com/ofBYIHVeo5— 菅野麻衣子 (@maiko_kanno_76) 2018年8月3日
Merchandise
Perhaps because there are many female fans, postcards, calendars, brooches, cushions, and other items were also on sale.
I visited on the opening day and the show was clearly popular — many red-dot “sold” stickers were visible.
The works, with their suggestive poses and shadows that go beyond mere brightness, are richly resonant. It seems the many young girls that appear in her work are given their expressions during the drawing process — and each girl ends up with a different face.
The writer also acquired a work for the collection.
The completion level of the works is high, and I felt a momentum suggesting her popularity will continue to rise.
