Even if you're not familiar with his Japanese boy band, Arashi, you might recognize Ninomiya Kazunari from his role as Private Saigo in Letters from Iwo Jima. An accomplished actor and musician at only 24 years old, Nino, as his fans affectionately call him, admits to also being a gaming otaku.
The artist who painted this week's piece doesn't actually own a Nintendo DS, nor has she ever played with one. But she knows all about Ninomiya, painting his image, admiring him from an oceanic distance of five thousand miles.
Koon Yew, in her late 20s, spends her days in Melbourne, Australia as a risk analyst, monitoring data and making financial forecasts, under the pressure of constant, stressful deadlines. Despite her studies in Engineering, Computer Science, and Business Systems, she dreams of living as an artist.
Koon returns home every night exhausted, then tries to pack everything she needs to do in the few hours that are left before her body quits -- eating, drawing, painting, and making her rounds online to keep up with Arashi and her other interests. She stays up much too late, too often. Once, she passed out while coming down her house stairs, lying unconscious at the bottom of the stairway for several hours after her fall.
Here is the cake she celebrated Ninomiya Kazunari's birthday with last June. Anticipating the holiday, Koon committed herself to drawing the pop idol's portrait every day during the two-and-a-half weeks leading up to the event."Wish you good health! Wish you good life! Wish you pleasant every day and night, doing what you want to do, being who you are, being real, being Nino."
"To do this," she explains, "one needs a 'muse.'" Koon has taken Arashi and Ninomiya as her muses, citing the latter's acting, song writing, and heartfelt singing as a source of inspiration. Each portrait is different, some playful and sketched with blue ink, others painted from photographs of her subject's youth.
The non-Ninomiya prints displayed in Koon's deviantArt shop are gorgeously colored, lonely city scenes underneath crisscrossing power lines and emerald skies. Her Afternoon in Odawara piece (pictured on the right), in particular, is so beautiful, it's hard to believe that she isn't a professional illustrator."My artwork and style, they're personal and free-flow. I'm kind of glad that I've never taken art courses ... being taught the 'correct' technique to draw/paint, theories about coloring and designing, analyzing certain schools of art style, etc. I prefer to explore techniques and style in my own way, drawing/painting subjects and things that interest me (persons, characters, streetscapes, certain feelings, life experience). That's what creative art is all about, I think."
_thumbnail.jpg "Mega Man Star Force 2")
_thumbnail.jpg "Rune Factory 2")
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
8-01-2007 @ 11:10PM
hvnlysoldr said...
Real cool. But that last picture is freaky with the hearts and pouty lips.
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8-13-2007 @ 10:32AM
Sophie said...
Nino-kun is so sweet with his Nintendo DS! ^0^ Nice cake too... love Nino 4ever!
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