Profiles of Contemporary Art and - ARTisSpectrum

Sachie Koyama
Caelestia Oil on Canvas 36” x 46”
For Japanese artist Sachie Koyama,
a painting is only complete when
it comes together to form a moment
of magnificence. Working intuitively,
she often begins from momentary
impressions, details of color, movement
or shape that evoke an atmosphere, and
she recreates those fleeting, ephemeral
moods on canvas or paper. Many of her
oil compositions are nearly atmospheric,
pointillist abstract fields filled with subtly
varied colors rippling from dark to
brighter areas like clouds gliding through
windy skies. Koyama, who studied in
New York at the National Academy
School of Fine Arts and the Art Students
League, manifests a palpable sense of
weightlessness and freedom in her art
while accumulating innumerable layers,
brushstrokes and daubs of paints—or,
in drawings, crisscrossing and accrued
lines of pencil and ink.
Another surprising and delightful strength
of Koyama’s work is its deceptive
simplicity, because the complexity is
always subtle. From a distance the
individual pen and pencil marks and
brushstrokes are barely visible, and one
is struck by the incredible fluidity of the
compositions, and the way clusters of
colors and shapes coalesce and dissolve
like currents running over the works’
surfaces. On a closer view, however,
each piece is made up of countless
networks of rivulets and tributaries, each
channeling tones and forms into pools of
light and shade to conjure that striking
wave-like sensation.
70 ARTisSpectrum
Vesper Oil on Canvas 18” x 24”
Sachie in her Studio
Whatever her abstracted visions may
conjure for viewers, their sources always
seem indisputably natural. Pieces may
be dominated by swells of blue paint
daubs, or speckled with whites, while
greens and pinks suggest a crisp sky, or
its reflection in gently undulating waters.
More dramatic and varied compositions
with greater shifts in hues and textures
evoke an atmosphere of a different
sort, with shades of black, deep blues,
turquoises and pale yellows reminding
the viewer of solar systems and bright
stars. But Koyama keeps figurative
meaning elusive. Rather than waves,
thick fog or windswept skies, she
pursues sensations evoked by standing
at the water’s edge or atop a mountain.
She conjures moods and meanings with
understatedly intricate environments of
color.
www.sachiekoyama.com
www.Agora-Gallery.com/ArtistPage/
Sachie_Koyama.aspx