Some of the best-yet-unsettling art in the world has often been created by male artists: be it Hemingway’s subtly disturbing short story, “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn,” the dark and surreal yarns of Cormac McCarthy (We hear reading Blood Meridian automatically qualifies you as suffering from PTSD), or the insidiously impossible physics of Dalí paintings, whenever we view somewhat disturbing artistic works, we tend to assume the author is a man.
So, you’d be forgiven for thinking the drawing below comes from a male artist with a particularly tormented past:
Of course, since you read the title to this article, you know this piece actually comes from a woman. And a woman who is something of a looker at that. Yes, artist Miwa Komatsu has become the next in the Asian journalism trend that I like to call, “Beautiful woman doing things;” That is, a woman of above-average physical beauty who enjoys mainstream media coverage by virtue of being a good looking lady who does something other than serve in traditional female roles.
It’s great, of course, that Ms. Komatsu is receiving media coverage at all, and, in this case, the artist’s physical beauty does serve a nice contrast to the sort-of disturbing imagery she concocts on the page, but one wonders if she would be more comfortable with her art standing in the limelight rather than the Japanese media’s selection of her own headshots they’ve lined up.
In fact, it took us a few minutes to find Ms. Komatsu’s actual works as opposed to pictures of her posing or looking intense-while-drawing; the first photos of her work that we actually came across come courtesy of the comments section of one of the many “Beautiful woman doing things” Japanese media posts found.
This isn’t to say we don’t appreciate the pictures of her at work. There’s something about viewing what appears to be a voraciously carnivorous nightmare owl being stabbed by a burlesque elephant that makes us long for a comforting female presence…
Source: Chihhylove
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