Hibiki Miyazaki

"(Un)seaworthy"  24" x 25"  painting on panel  2010

"Last Day of Summer"  24" x 25"  oil on panel

"Mirror"  23.5" x 26"  print - sandblast ground, spit bite, roulette, aquatint, drypoint  2010

"Don't Look Up"  2010

"Dreams of Travel"  15" x 18"  acrylic and colored pencil on paper  2012

Hibiki Miyazaki's work is like a secret code. Somewhere between the lands of pop-culture and her own interior psychological landscape there must be a de-coder ring hidden in the bottom of a box of very curious breakfast cereal. Alas, I have not found it. But that does not keep me from gazing in fascination at her work. She is an extraordinary print-maker employing a dizzying array of techniques. She's also a fine painter. In either medium, or in any of the others she's likely to employ, it is the idiosyncratic nature of her collage-like style that draws you in. Her art hangs in a delicate balance between finished product and work in progress, recalling to mind Picasso's blithe comment that if he ever finished a painting he'd be finished as a painter. Perhaps mention of Picasso is apt, for Miyazaki seems to be interested in continuing to explore some early modernist ideas. In the past artistic movements came into and then went out of fashion. Many of those movements faded long before they were fully explored, a fact I once lamented, for it seemed to me that each one was in theory an infinite playground for artistic ideas. Now there are seven billion of us on the planet and visual information flows freely back and forth. It warms my heart to see this kind of work (and every other that might have once faded into mere historical context) being worked in new and meaningful ways. Now if I could just figure out what those meanings were....
You can see loads of stuff on both her Flickr page and at her gallery's website: www.augengallery.com