About
Shirley Asano Guldimann is a Southern California artist, whose works emerge as visual poetry. Her figurative art, painted with water-based mediums, evokes what is fleeting and elusive about her subjects, and reflects her Japanese-inflected aesthetic.
Artist Statement
Shirley Asano Guldimann’s painting is a visual poem, capturing a mood, a thought, an instance of this mutable world. Because her subjects serve as prisms for what is beautiful and transitory, a certain pensiveness or melancholy pervades much of her artwork, along with a quiet celebration of the truth of the rendered moment.
Her paintings also represent an artistic exploration. Whether painting with ink, watercolor or acrylic she controls the unpredictability of her water-based mediums. “I wish to honor and learn from the story that the paint has to tell,” Guldimann says.
Guldimann’s earliest artistic influence was a book of childhood poems, decorated with lovely and whimsical illustrations. “I fell in love with the colored images as much as with the rhymes themselves,” she says. The hard work of becoming an artist she undertook under the tutelage of her mentor and friend, Joe Blaustein, eminent artist and UCLA art teacher. Blaustein not only taught her what he terms “the rhetoric of art,” but inspired her to make each drawing or painting an existential journey. “I don’t always succeed in this,” Guldimann says, “but it is what I aspire to do.” This aspiration is what imbues her art with life and strength.
Guldimann’s work can be found in a number of private collections, and she has exhibited widely in Southern California. She is represented by TAG Gallery in Los Angeles, CA.