Art books: Mogu Takahashi

photo taken from Takahashi's zine, Chotto Omoshiroi

Mogu Takahashi is my number one favourite artist and her carefree style is a huge inspiration to me. She paints and draws and makes with such a joyous spirit of freedom and spontaneity, with childish humour and aloofness running gleefully through her work. She is also an artist who expresses herself in book form. This is something I can relate to, and my reason for talking about her, because I have made art books previously and loved the form.

With a book, as Paul and I discussed in a recent tutorial, you are able to create, and invite viewers into, your own intense and tiny little world. I think returning to the book as a method of presenting my work may be a good idea at this time, as a book can tie many paintings together with a sort of visual narrative, and it automatically turns paintings into a single more tactile object which viewers are forced to interact with. This seems a good way of involving people in my work and encouraging people to become invested in my work and responsive to it as they turn pages and inspect the book themselves. Even the noise the pages make, or how they bend as a person turns them - these things can become part of the artwork itself, contributing to a deeper visceral experience.