Sunday, December 03, 2006

A Defense of Pure Creativity


Yanase and Maya Maxx
Originally uploaded by benkei242.

Japanese artist Maya Maxx gave a 1-hour "live painting" demonstration tonight, leaving behind one wall-sized mural depicting a pair of monkeys and the cryptically open-ended legend "everytime, everywhere, everybody." Inclusiveness aside (a concession to the throng of grade-school children in the front row scribbling with crayons?), her mission and method carried an inspiring message of anti-pragmatism: she does what she does because it is fun. Having attained considerable success in Japan, she's planning to move to NYC in 2008 to 'reset' her career and start from zero. It's as if her artistic production cannot grow and develop without an attendant transformation in herself.

Maya does not consider herself an artist who needs to self-consciously expound or theorize. She speaks of artistic process rather than artistic significance, and she exhibits a purity of purpose unsullied by pragmatism. She has no idea (or interest in?) what critics in the U.S. say about her. Her art is thus disarmingly artless, and, accustomed to being filmed on the Japanese 1-hour television format, her technique is adaptable, efficient, and rowdy with speed. She begins by outlining the eyes with pencil lines (crushed into the paper with forceful conviction), then sketching the form with brush and black ink, and finally smearing color in left-right arcs with her fingers ("the fastest way to get color onto the paper"). "To draw a male or a female, you just need to imagine in your mind a male or female, and then draw." Wonderfully unaffected.

I couldn't help thinking that her example should serve as an inspiration for anyone faced with the bewitching lure of compromise.

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