A blend of pan-Asian, European and American influences, Dana Kawano & Remarque Loy spent 40 years apart to come together to create art-art with messaging and with an advocacy of art education-to show the world that kids have a fundamental and urgent need for art in their lives. Moments into their first meeting they discovered their common concern that violence in public schools today directly reflects their continuing de-emphasis on art; that the creative soul is being starved in our youth.
As they became acquainted and explored each other's art, they found that something truly mystical was afoot: each had chosen similar subject matter to paint; they employed the same color pallet, lines, strokes, passion and soul. They even had similar signatures-in short, spooky.
As Remarque summarizes:
Both of us were looking for someone to bounce off ideas. But that didn't prepare us for the fact each of us has what the other needed in our art. She needed an edge and I needed grace. I really need grace. In fact if it wasn't for grace, I'd be burning in hell! We're both extremely passionate, and we're both incredibly intense, about whatever it is, about feelings, about life, about issues. We're intense! About color, feeling, emotion, mostly just art. Sometimes you wish you could just skim over things, just lighten up, but we're not like that.
A third-generation Japanese American born on the rough side of Sacramento, CA, Dana Kawano earned childhood awards for art. Responding to family influence, Dana successfully pursued a more practical career than art. After 14 years in high-tech management, she yielded to her inner voice to pursue art full time.
Remarque Loy, a Guyanese national of Indian, Chinese, and Portuguese descent, moved to the United States in 1970 and has lived his passion for art, in his words "all my life."
Both sensitive people, with individual ups and downs, working together, they sometimes balance each other out, and sometimes they amplify. Their best creativity occurs when they reach that quiet space in the calm between the storms.
Dana describes it:
When we do art together, we get really calm. It's like music with the same beat. There's a calmness that surrounds us that supports the silent dialog. We could be talking, but as we start doing art, it just gets quiet. And then the creativity flows through and around us. In that quiet zone, we lose our personas and focus on the moment of creativity, and it's just our pure essences collaborating on the art...
And yet there's a dynamic tension: Dana's grace pulls at and softens Remarque's raw edge. They have succeeded where many fail, in keeping ego off to the side and being able to finish what one started from the other, and maintaining fluidity even as they're shifting leads. In so doing, they fuel each others inspirational fire on new designs, compositions and concepts.
His is self assertive while hers is introspective. Hers reflects an infusion of Asian heritage, distinct femininity and island influence. His brings an industrial edge; capturing raw images that are true and faithful essences of that moment in time. Kawano and Loy fuse contemporary technology with traditional art techniques. They recognize the importance of classical methods but avoid purist sentiments, suggesting that taken to the extreme, we'd still be scrawling on cave walls with charcoal. In reality, artists have traditionally made use of the best tools available during their time. And so Kawano and Loy employ digital photography, scanning, Adobe Photoshop techniques and self-developed image-to-media transfer methods together with oil painting and other traditional techniques without apology. They are pioneering a new genre of creativity they call Transfigurism.
Kawano and Loy have exhibited collaborative works at American Art Gallery in Carmel, California, the Triton Museum of Art in Santa Clara, California, the Gardener, Berkeley, California, Homescape, Carmel, California, Gallery img, in Sunnyvale, California, San Francisco Open Studios 2001 and numerous private showings and receptions in the San Francisco Bay Area.
