Gallery Artist Endorses Renaissance Soul Natsuya Uesugi
Natsuya Uesugi is a brilliant artist, writer, and technologist. A Renaissance human, living today, quietly generating art and writing at a pace that would kill most people. For him, it’s another day of being.
Many artists talk about la Belle Époque or the time of the Lost Generation in Paris, but few have captured the gritty truths and tough underbelly that was intrinsic to the art scene in New York City during the ’90s. In “Sheer”, Natsuya Uesugi reflects back to me the combined darkness and light of this period and really all periods that birthed artists and great art out of the drugs, the hard choices, out of people’s bodies, with artists bound together for some, a lifetime in their formative rebirths together.
Some of these people stay with you, tied by the past dysfunction where there wasn’t any money, the street and the New York elite played together, and life was threatened as much by foes as by friends. From this or in spite of this struggle springs brilliance and creativity that generates lasting, and unfortunately lasting bonds with friends who in other circumstances would-be enemies. Any artist reading Sheer will be visited by their own past and pain, or that of their close relative or friend having struggled similarly to find themselves and discover the manifestation of their dreams in and with other people who build, or detract from that dream. We learn from all of them.
Christopher Bridges
Painter, Blacksmith, Technologist
WonkyData