Artist: Carl Randall (1975 – )
Title: Tokyo
Date: 2011
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: Height: 150 cm (59 in); Width: 65 cm (25.5 in)
What I love about this image:
This image shows us the artist’s view of modern 21st Century society before the Covid-19 pandemic, painted predominantly in shades of gray. Technology is the all-knowing, ever-watchful god in this world.
Buildings, filled to capacity, loom over streets jammed with people, most talking into devices. Everyone goes forward, each individual focused on their own goal, unaware of the seething ocean of humanity around them, carried along on the currents and the tide.
About the artist (via Wikipedia):
Carl Randall was born in 1975, in the UK. He is a graduate of The Slade School of Fine Art London (BA Fine Art), the Royal Drawing School London (The Drawing Year), and Tokyo University of the Arts Japan (MFA & PhD Fine Art).
He was awarded The BP Travel Award 2012, for his proposal to walk in the footsteps of the Japanese ukiyo-e printmaker Andō Hiroshige, creating paintings of the people and places of contemporary Japan. His project involved spending time in Japan resulting in a group of 15 paintings exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London as part of The 2013 BP Portrait Award exhibition, under the title “In the Footsteps of Hiroshige – The Tokaido Highway and Portraits of Modern Japan”. The exhibition subsequently toured to The Aberdeen Art Gallery Scotland, The Wolverhampton Art Gallery England, and then formed his solo exhibition in Japan ‘Portraits from Edo to the Present at The Shizuoka City Tokaido Hiroshige Museum, where the paintings were exhibited alongside Hiroshige’s original The Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō woodblock prints. In conjunction with these exhibitions, the book Carl Randall – Japan Portraits was published, illustrating paintings and drawings made in Japan, with a foreword by British author Desmond Morris, and an introduction by the late American writer Donald Richie. A short documentary, Carl Randall – Japan Portraits was also made, showing the artist painting and drawing in Japan His Japan paintings were also the subject of a 2016 ‘World Update’ interview by the BBC World Service (titled ‘Painting the faces in Japan’s crowded cities’), and he was also interviewed by CNN about his Japanese work. [1]
To learn more about Carl Randall and his art, go to Carl Randall – Artist. Contemporary Figurative Painter.
Credits and Attributions:
[1] Wikipedia contributors, “Carl Randall,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Carl_Randall&oldid=1018005949 (accessed May 27, 2021).
Wikimedia Commons contributors, “File:Carl-randall-tokyo-painting-cityscape.jpg,” Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Carl-randall-tokyo-painting-cityscape.jpg&oldid=504966563 (accessed May 27, 2021). This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International lice
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