Venturous Vixens

One of my favorite contemporary artists is Audrey Kawasaki. Audrey, known for her ethereal oil-on-wood paintings, is a 24-year-old Japanese artist out of L.A. and a dropout from the Pratt Institute.

Her paintings are breathtakingly beautiful and surreal seeing as they were created using a delightful mix of Manga and Art Nouveau. She has an uncanny style of depicting the female form (reminiscent of Schiele and Klimt), showing the subjects in innocent and also very sensual/erotic ways while at the same time exuding a darker tone and a disturbing presence of strange magnificent alien princesses with porcelain doll faces. This magnetic kind of glamour that suggests a darker side to all this seductiveness is stunningly alluring. Her girls are precious, pouty, sexy and a tinge of misery or despair is sprinkled around their eyes as if they were just caught in an ephemeral and otherworldly moment of indulgence.

She paints with luscious and delicate brushstrokes, adding to the haunting fairytale atmosphere. Her sharp yet dreamy imagery combined with the wood panels that she paints on, creates an unexpected warmth to the inscrutable subject matter. She gives her seductive yet melancholy characters a sensual esoteric realm of their own that lures in spectators and produces a faint sense of accessibility. The intriguing and feminine bedroom (come and get me) eyes of these elusive women are Kawasaki’s weapon of choice to enthral her mesmerized audience.