⊛ Look to the Sea • Amabie ⊛ cut paper + washi + chiyogami / wood ⊛ 9.7 x 14.4 in • 247 x 365 mm — **⊛ Look to the Sea • Amabie**
⊛ cut paper + washi + chiyogami / wood
⊛ 9.7 x 14.4 in • 247 x 365 mm

From the deep, a hero rises.

A defender of life. A sea-born shield against the evils of the world. A mer…person carrying a warning of epidemic disease. Or, sometimes, news of a great harvest, but this time it’s the bad stuff. A prophet who grants protection to all who carry a picture of her with them. That seems arbitrary, but okay.

She comes, enveloped in a heavenly glow (divine power ? bio-luminescent algae ?), resplendent in her coat of shimmering scales. Her three…count ‘em three…legs or fins churn the waters. Through her birdlike beak - although squid have beaks too, nobody ever remembers that - she calls out her dire portent. But oh, that lustrous hair!

A long-overdue day in the sun

Amabie’s first - and only - recorded appearance (1846)

Amabie 「アマビエ」, a yokai, first popped up in recorded history in 1846 on a woodblock printed kawaraban (basically, a newspaper). Appearing near the shore in Kumamoto prefecture (then known as Higo), she promised 6 years of auspicious harvests. Oh, and should disease spread, just show the afflicted her likeness. Then she disappeared back into the waves. There really isn’t much more to the story, but if you’d like to check it out for yourself, here you go.

The next time she appeared was…never.

She was so shy that, as the years passed, some people assumed she was basically a typo.

Imagine her surprise when 2020 and Covid-19 ripped her from obscurity and turned her into a pop culture phenomenon. A meme, even.

She has become so popular on twitter (amabie14), Instagram, and so many more that the Japanese government even felt the need to jump on her bandwagon. Last Spring she assisted the Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare get the word out about the Coronavirus.

Japan Ministry of Health, Labour, and Welfare embraced Amabie as an educational ambassador

I’m not sure how she herself feels about being yanked out of retirement (I imagine her sunning herself on a southern shore, willfully ignoring the constant “bing” of her phone). I couldn’t be happier for her.

Maximal Layerage!

Full confession: I’ve been holding on to Amabie for a couple months now, selfishly keeping her to myself. I can’t remember when I started working on this piece. My wife probably brought the idea to me near the beginning of her ascent, last Spring. I know I worked on her for ages, throughout the summer, in fits and starts.

I had a couple of goals with this piece:

First, have fun. I take myself too seriously sometimes, and watching my income plummet during a pandemic didn’t help me lighten up. Amabie did though. She’s such a wonderfully awkward collage of animal parts that I couldn’t help but fall in love.
Second, have lots of fun with bright colors. I tend to work with limited (sometimes very limited) color schemes. Here was a chance to really stretch. I used papers for her hair that I’d been too scared to touch before.
Third, wood! I almost always use wood as a base for my art these days, but I’m out of the habit of letting it show. I’m obsessed with the wood grain, and how it can become an integral part of the image. Plus, I’d done some studying regarding preparing wood for art, and wanted to see how it would work out. I like it. It did make scanning and photographing the piece a little more complicated, though.

And then there’s the layering. Without a doubt, Amabie is the thickest piece I’ve done so far.

There are just so, so many layers. The waves are a dozen layers deep. The hair is at least 15 layers. For the perspective of her body to appear in front of her hair to work, I had to build up the foundation layering there even more.

And let’s not even mention the scales. Rather, lets. Each scale is two layers of chiyogami, individually cut and puzzled together. I had to draw up maps and blueprints of her parts to keep me from getting utterly lost.

I owe Amabie my gratitude. She helped get me back into making art at a time when my body and mind were supremely unfocused. My family and friends have come through the pandemic safely so far (although not without a good number of scares). There’s reason for optimism.

Turns out, I’m a sucker for an optimistic monster.