After a period of experimentation influenced by modern Western styles of painting, Kokuryo Tsunero adopted pointillism from the mid-1950s. Pointillism is a technique of painting using dots, but if you take it too far, the image ultimately becomes unrecognizable. Kokuryo himself described his approach in this period as his “cubist-style split composition tendency,” meaning he would arrange his dots so they would roughly form into vertical lines, thereby allowing the geometric shapes of buildings and ships to faintly emerge. In other words, in order to maintain the image of the landscape with a boat, he has cleverly combined the conflicting tendencies of pointillism to deconstruct, and of the vertical lines to rhythmically unify, the image.
(MINAMISHIMA Ko)
After a period of experimentation influenced by modern Western styles of painting, Kokuryo Tsunero adopted pointillism from the mid-1950s. Pointillism is a technique of painting using dots, but if you take it too far, the image ultimately becomes unrecognizable. Kokuryo himself described his approach in this period as his “cubist-style split composition tendency,” meaning he would arrange his dots so they would roughly form into vertical lines, thereby allowing the geometric shapes of buildings and ships to faintly emerge. In other words, in order to maintain the image of the landscape with a boat, he has cleverly combined the conflicting tendencies of pointillism to deconstruct, and of the vertical lines to rhythmically unify, the image.
(MINAMISHIMA Ko)