L.A. artist turns colourful sand into whimsical artwork (and sunae kits)

The artist who goes solely by the mononym Naoshi is a grasp at spinning tiny grains of sand into one thing grand.

She makes a speciality of sunae, the Japanese artwork of creating photographs out of coloured sand. In her tidy Alhambra residence studio, she meticulously assembles out-of-this-world tableaux in saturated, punchy hues.

Naoshi’s items often focus on an elegant ingenue sporting food-focused trend — suppose bonnets product of bonbons and boba tea skirts. One of her earliest characters, Ice Cream Girl, is a go-getter with a scoop for a head, impressed by a personality she drew as a toddler. Another of her stars is a fierce fast-food warrior clad in a cheeseburger skirt, wielding ketchup and mustard laser weapons and flanked by a squad of fighters who occur to be anthropomorphic pizza and scorching canines.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

In this sequence, we spotlight unbiased makers and artists, from glassblowers to fiber artists, who’re creating authentic merchandise in and round Los Angeles.

But not the entire artist’s works have a gourmand bent — she additionally creates celestial goddesses and nature-inspired divas, and made a sequence dedicated to the Major Arcana of tarot. Her “It” women usually go along with a coterie of tiny monkeys, kittens or creatures with confections for heads. Their vibrant, jam-packed settings depict something from an oceanic rave to a rainbow-hued large prime efficiency to a joyride by the cosmos. And irrespective of the motif, she at all times makes positive her topics are “playful, sweet and dreamy.”

“When I was a child, I had the experience of making sunae using a kit,” she recalled throughout a current interview. “That memory stayed with me very strongly.”

Harnessing that nostalgia, she began creating and promoting small DIY sunae kits of her personal design in 2004.

Food-focused characters dominate Naoshi’s work, together with image books and sand artwork kits.

“I began making [them] with the hope that they could become a fun and memorable experience for someone else as well,” she stated of the kits, which vary from straightforward to difficult, accommodating budding artists of any age and talent set.

But whipping up certainly one of her full-scale smorgasbords of sprinkled donuts, popcorn and nigiri for a gallery show isn’t mere little one’s play. The approach includes attaching an authentic sketch to an adhesive backing, reducing it out, strategically sprinkling sand on the specified areas, then eradicating any misplaced grains one after the other. Each piece takes her anyplace from a couple of days to some weeks.

Originally from Japan (Yokohama by means of Iwate), Naoshi first visited Southern California in 2010, when she participated in a Sanrio anniversary exhibition in Santa Monica. There, she displayed her work and held a sand artwork workshop.

“It was such a really inspiring experience, I began to feel that I wanted to challenge myself as an artist in Los Angeles,” she stated. “It’s always so sunny and the food is so good! In Japan, a lot of people wear black and white, but in L.A. everything’s so colorful. I get inspiration all the time.”

Since taking the leap to dwelling within the L.A. space in 2014, she has exhibited her work at Gallery Nucleus, Corey Helford Gallery and La Luz de Jesus Gallery, to call a couple of. She has additionally performed workshops and offered merchandise — from artwork prints to T-shirts to washi tape — at such spots as Leanna Lin’s Wonderland, Popkiller and Pygmy Hippo Shoppe.

Jars of colourful sand and candy art work fills Naoshi’s studio.

Establishing herself in a brand new nation was not with out its challenges. “The culture is totally different,” she defined. “I felt stress every day.”

Early obstacles included overcoming the language barrier, in addition to studying tips on how to navigate the town’s vastness, tips on how to open a checking account, and the place to seek out markets and eating places the place she may purchase her favourite Japanese delicacies.

“I eventually started to enjoy the act of challenging myself,” she stated of her transition part. These days, she high-fives herself for efficiently submitting enterprise taxes on her personal and she or he has develop into an everyday at Katsu-Jin, a Tonkatsu spot in South Pasadena.

Last yr, Naoshi launched “The ABC of Sunae,” a mini-encyclopedia of kinds that traces the worldwide origins of sand artwork in its numerous kinds, together with the ceremonial sand work of the Navajo within the American Southwest and the non secular sand mandalas of Tibetan Buddhists. She additionally takes readers behind the scenes of her method to the craft, displaying off her most popular instruments and offering step-by-step pictures of the method.

“The biggest challenge of working with sand is that there’s no room for mistakes,” she stated whereas sitting at a worktable stocked with dozens of small sand-filled glass jars, all organized by colour. “Once the sand sticks, it’s almost impossible to make corrections. So if there’s even a small part I’m not satisfied with, I have to start over from the very first step.”

The intricate nature of sunae signifies that if Naoshi makes a mistake, she has to begin throughout.

A stark white workspace stuffed with pure mild, her trusty craft knife, a gradual hand and a eager pair of eyes are all important for maintaining her women’ cheeks rosy and for making their backdrops sparkle. And she maintains sanity by working to a soundtrack of her favourite Japanese pop songs and the bouncing beats of Basement Jaxx.

“Sand may be the opposite of an efficient or convenient material,” she stated, “but its soft texture and the time I spend deeply focusing on the process feels almost meditative to me.”