2007-12-11 - 3:50 p.m.
Important Works of Art in Hachinohe
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Old Bus Filled With Red Tricycles
The old bus is completely, floor-to-ceiling, filled with identical red tricycles, and I'm of the opinion that it is one of the best works of art that I've ever seen. The yard the old bus occupies is host to other works of art as well - Glass Display Case Filled With Stainless Steel Kettles is worth mentioning - but Old Bus Filled With Red Tricycles is my favorite by far.
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A Painting Obviously Not Made by a Five-Year-Old, Made by a Five-Year-Old
This important piece of art is currently on display in my local grocery store. I first noticed it was while I was shopping with Shuhei.
Shuhei, check this out, I said. This is amazing! Can you believe that a five-year-old did this?
Shuhei looked at the painting, then at me, and then at the painting again.
Uh, yeah, he said. They might have cheated.
And by `they might have cheated` what Shuhei really meant was that it was pretty obvious that mom or dad had put a lot of work into this painting. (But wasn't it nice of my sweetheart to put it that way?)
Some moms and dads do things like that.
The result is quite impressive. Colorful ocean creatures (or are they amoeba drawn by cavemen?) are being observed by widely smiling faces with arms coming out from their ears. The faces have been painted in so skillfully that, despite their ridiculousness, they actually look pretty lifelike. And the masterful blending of various shades in the background have the effect of suggesting a purple abyss that stretches on forever. I find myself quite taken with the incongruency that's been created between the two-dimentional figures in the foreground and this endless purple abyss.
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Terrible Picture of an Actually Pretty Girl
Terrible Picture of an Actually Pretty Girl is four stories tall and located next to a set of particularly ill-conceived traffic lights, which has given me plenty of time to study this work in some detail.
I am aware that this work of art is, in fact, a stock photo, but the fact that it is four stories tall has, I've decided, thusly qualified it as art. The question, and what makes this work interesting, is why this particular photo was selected to be blown up to such proportions?
In the photo, a generically pretty-looking girl winks at the camera. It is an ambiguous sort of wink, not overtly flirtatious, but not entirely un-flirtatious either. Or so was the idea...
In reality, the girl in this photo looks as though she has been holding her wink for two minutes or more, and also like she was thinking about the positioning of her mouth while this photo was being taken.
Rather than the whimsy of a playful wink, what strikes me about this photo is how tedious it surely must have been while taking it, and how her facial expression is making the pretty girl's face look asymmetrical in the way that birth defects and extra chromosomes create.
Is it a clever example, intending to appeal to ugly people, of how good-looking people can look terrible too? Is it a visual warning of the consequences of insincere living? Or was it simply selected from the other photos as a way of drawing the most attention for the least money?
Whatever the reason behind it, I'm deeply impressed by the genius that went into transforming this would-be boring photograph into a thought-provoking work of art.
