Artist Lecture

I went to see Kota Ezawa speak this afternoon in the August Coppola Theater. I've been intrigued by his work for years and so it was interesting to see him and hear about his thought processes. You may know him by this piece, an animated painting of the O.J. Simpson verdict:

This piece, which is accompanied by real audio from the hearing took him over a year to complete and is on view in The Fine Arts Gallery at SFSU for another week or so. He also showed us a piece called "Who's Afraid of Black, White and Gray", inspired by the film. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf", and is done in all gray tones.

I appreciate that he uses subject matter that Americans can easily connect to. When he was first beginning to study art, his favorites were Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons. He enjoyed their banality and the fact that their work was easily understandable by all. (which is exactly what Gilbert and George are claiming to do)

He believes in the "original thought" and spoke about working intuitively. What he does is this: he takes the first thing that comes to his mind, does it, and then later works out it's meaning. I really appreciate this notion that you don't have to kick an idea into the ground in order to make it meaningful. If a person is confident that his or her first idea will be meaningful, and is willing to put in the amount of work, this way would allow a whole new experience of the creative process.