Seeking to express the true voice of life while contemplating the effects of media and mass production on the collective subconscious, Japanese artist Takuya Sugiyama creates both realism and abstraction, both rooted in his singular and detail-filled linear style. Exotic and endangered animals like rhinos, elephants, and penguins fill Sugiyama’s surfaces with their massive, hulking forms as he quietly addresses the transience and uncertainty of nature’s future. Sugiyama’s abstract and geometric shapes become a harmonic and energetic expression of reality, developed without preconception or limitation within the physical world. As he works in ink and watercolor on paper Sugiyama builds the delicate lacework of his compositions line by line, creating intricate trailing tendrils and rippling spheres of free form patterning. The clean clarity of the space surrounding Sugiyama’s drawings becomes an important element of the work, emphasizing its meditative nature.
Born in Japan and currently living and working in Tokyo, Takuya Sugiyama studied at the Tama University of Arts with a focus in environmental design.