Kaori Maeyama
“As an urban landscape painter in New Orleans, my focus is to paint the city’s backside through a Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, an appreciation of impermanence and imperfection. In describing the streetscapes and river scenes in thin, muted colors of oil paint, my work explores the beauty within the banal and broken, and the uncertainty through obscured vision and passage of time. Like in music, I’m most interested in the visceral aspect of painted images, especially in subdued mood and atmosphere.
My current focus in painting is to create the impression of intangibles like ray of light and humidity, as well as the sense of movement in static images. In transitioning from painting en plein air to a studio painter eight years ago, I stopped using paint brushes. Instead, printmaking brayers and window cleaning squeegees apply and erase thin layers of oil paint on cradled wooden panels. Unlike the traditional oil painting process, where light colors sit on top of darker layers, areas of the light values have the least amount of paint in my compositions. Extensive subtractive method and translucent glazes bring out the illusion of radiance, while the visible brayer marks distort the ordinary sights and amplify the feeling of motion and direction.
The fugitive moments captured in my nocturne paintings question the preconceptions, as darkness conceals the obvious and mystifies the mundane. The seasonal existence of the Mississippi batture scenes mourn the natural world going out of order, and CinemaScope-like aspect ratio exaggerates the magnitude of responsibilities. The unconventional mark making tools blur the line between the real and the imagined, and by evoking their memories and yearning, these desaturated paintings invite the viewers as protagonists to insert their own narratives.” - Maeyama
Kaori Maeyama is a Japanese urban landscape painter based in New Orleans. Focusing on decay and isolation of the mundane as the primary subject matter, she uses a tonal palette and visual noise to amplify the passage of time and the atmosphere of ordinary landscapes. LeMieux Galleries and Staple Goods in New Orleans regularly host her solo exhibitions, and O’Kane Gallery at the University of Houston-Downtown held a solo exhibition in 2023. Her work has also been shown in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. She is a recipient of residencies and grants from Joan Mitchell Center, Vermont Studio Center, and National Performance Network, and periodicals such as Louisiana Life Magazine, Gambit Weekly, and Pelican Bomb have reviewed her paintings. She is a member of Staple Goods, an artist-run gallery and collective in New Orleans, and teaches at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. She holds a BA in film production from the University of New Orleans and an MFA in painting from Tulane University.
