About
Shirley Asano Guldimann is a native Angeleno, and her artistic style is undoubtedly inspired by her Japanese heritage. Her paintings and drawings often include the human figure, as seen in unusual and poetic works where she explores the mutability of a variety of water-based media. Allowing the vagaries of water to inspire her work, she intuitively creates with the medium as her partner in silent but organic collaboration. Similarly, when drawing, she often allows the line to take her where it will.
Shirley grew up with a creative extended family that included a paternal grandmother and maternal aunt, each in their own way bringing a Japanese aesthetic of beauty into their lives in humble ways. Arranging a graceful ikebana flower arrangement or allowing a plant to trail from the top of a bookcase were small aesthetic accents that still resonate with the artist, providing a lyrical and poetic inspiration to much of her work.
Working in a variety of mediums, techniques, and styles that range from line drawings to small but intense portraits done with dip pen and ink, to paintings in watercolor, acrylic, and water-soluble oil, each piece of art she creates has a logic and life of its own. This tendency to change things up, she half-seriously jokes, can result in her solo shows looking a bit like group shows. What marks her uniquely captivating drawings and paintings, whether they feature people, nature, architecture or abstraction, is the intensity of her gaze by which she entices the viewer to actively engage with her art.
Artist Statement
My artwork strives to convey the strange beauty of life and capture meaning in this fleeting existence.
For whatever success I have achieved, I thank Joe Blaustein, artist and UCLA art instructor, who taught me both the ‘rhetoric of art’ and that each work is an existential journey. He also created a wonderful community of artists who to this day encourage each other. Most of all, heartfelt and immeasurable thanks to my husband, John, who has engaged in art since boyhood. He says he started me on the art path by showing me his drawing of a naked woman and a fish when we were both in law school. My initial reaction, he remembers with amusement, was not encouraging, but the image he drew stuck with me, like a grain of irritating sand giving rise to a pearl in an oyster.”