Makiko Kudo Dog and Cat, 2011 Oil on canvas 130 x 162 com Makiko Kudo (B.1978) With her primitive brushwork, Makiko Kudo paints the world she has actually seen and experienced such as plants, trees and rivers she sees while walking, a house she used to live in, cats, the moon in the sky, and a dreamy girl, creating somewhat lonely and fleeting fantasy, yet recalling the sweet memories of the past in the paintings. Developing multifarious surfaces simultaneously, bold compositions and free touch of her paintings sometimes display the memories of a childhood sensitivity, giving viewers a fresh impression. Terry R. Myers has rightly spoken of "a level of painterly complexity and 'touch' not typically seen in Japanese painting of the last decade" in Kudo's work, but what I want to emphasize is how this complexity of fracture represents a twofold sensitivity, both to the surface of the painting as an entity that is not to be thought o as "flat" but on the contrary as dense, richly nuanced, and multivalent, and to the sensations and impulses that play across it. It is in the orchestration of this multiplicity that Kudo's recent paintings attain a kind of classical grandeur."
