Chapter #01: My "Almost Perfect" Art Residency in Tokyo
Tones's first ever experience at an Art Residency creating a travel Journal about Japan
Hey everyone,
This is Tones :) I hope you’ve all been keeping well! Thank you all so much for your interest in my project and first ever experience at an art residency. For those of you who came to the gallery opening, or asked to see the art I have created since I came back - thank you, thank you, thank you for all the wonderful comments, feedback and support! And thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. I really appreciate it and it helps me tremendously to keep going :)
As promised, here is the first instalment of notes and sketches from the residency. I will aim to send a maximum of 1 or 2 emails a month, I promise not to spam too much :). The newsletters will contain updates about how the project is going, sneak peaks into some of the sketches, thoughts on the creation of a book from scratch and the process of finding its style (nervous laughter). This particular instalment ended up a little lengthy, but by way of introductions and for the sake of context, I thought it’s okay. I will aim to have the future e-mail letters fairly succinct - less “life story” and more drawings :)
So here we go, I thought I’d start off with a little recap of what the project and residency was all about for those of you who didn’t get to attend the exhibition in Tokyo in person, as everyone I know has been asking me about it! :)
Why I went and what I did?
In 2017 I went to Japan for the very first time. I travelled around a big chunk of the country over a month with my good friend and uni housemate Amy Elsam (and Toby Seale who joined us for half of that trip) and the experience was and still is very close to my heart. It affected me in a huge way and sparked the idea of creating a travel journal about Japan. Fast forward to this September 2024, I came back to Japan for a new set of experiences! This time for an art residency at “Almost Perfect” in Tokyo. It was time to make that travel journal happen! The experience was made all the more special by the fact I got to share it with my best friend and sisteru Esther Morales who did the residency at the same time. And so, we had our little wooden shop and got to working.
What is “Almost Perfect”?
It is an Artist Residency based in Tokyo inside a 100-year-old rice house, converted in a modern Japanese style. It is run by the lovely Yuka & Luis Mendo who are also creatives themselves working in the Sustainable fashion industry and Illustration respectively. You can check out their website here. Esther and I had the whole house to ourselves - we lived on the top 2 floors and worked and exhibited our drawings on the bottom floor which was the shop front and exhibition space. Luis also invited us over to 2 very lovely artists’ exhibitions - Adrien Johnson and Yusigo <3. It was great to also be able to hang out and chat with the guys too. We also met up with and hung out with a lot of other artists - tattooist, I’m looking at you Yumi ^^, illustrators and photographers during our stay. It was all very inspiring!
About the experience: “The Finding and Gathering Book“
During my stay I got to thinking about what travel actually means to me, why I need it, why I absolutely had to come back to Japan again and what this place gives me. What I didn’t expect was that this pondering would bring into question my whole approach to drawing, how working in the animation industry has affected my personal art and what struggles and thoughts I have trapped in my head + a whole lot of other general life questions.
For me this automatically meant that the project grew in scale very quickly. It wasn’t just about creating a series of random illustrations and sketches of the different places that I visited anymore. I wanted to play around with the structure of the book more, maybe experiment with different mediums, try out several different styles until I found something that “sparked joy“ and felt like the right approach for the overall book. I wanted to weave in a story with the illustrations as I was also doing some writing. In other words, now that I finally had some time to myself, and… freedom if you will, I felt the urge to play, to be “unleashed”, to just have fun with drawing. I realised I reeeeeally needed time to do some serious soul searching. And enjoy the hell out of it.
And then the realisation kicked in - I only have 1 month. And a mountain of directions that I wanted to explore + places in Tokyo I still wanted to visit with Esther. I also felt quite nervous about the exhibition - it was the first time ever that I had the chance to have one of my own but I was also developing a project that was meant to be contained in a sketchbook. Oh how I wished I had more than a month... Long story short, after some chats with Luis and Esther, they helped me come up with a name for the exhibition - “The Finding and Gathering Book”. As small as it may seem, having a name for the exhibition, that was representative of the stage of the process I was at, felt like a relief. It also felt honest. “I am finding and gathering right now”. Suddenly I felt more okay with sharing my work in progress with people I hadn’t even met. It’s usually a little hard for me to show my rough drawings and thinking process with anyone as I fear I would be judged.
My approach for the sketchbook became all about gathering as many sketches, ideas and random notes as I could from the trip. With the idea that I will create a final book when I get back home and work more on final pieces and putting it all together. This allowed the sketchbook to be messy for the sake of the search! I mostly did fast line drawings with ink and pencil + some marker and watercolour sketches (this I found was fastest to jot down ideas). I drew on random pages, not following a particular order. It’s interesting to observe how the blank sketchbook pages get filled, like pieces to a puzzle. In a weird way it beats the fear of an empty page. Go figure.
I had 2 sketchbooks - the main one for all the drawings and 1 small one to collect patterns in, or test out mark-making with different materials (which was yet another thing I have been wanting to do for ages). I also had 1 notebook where I wrote stuff, though those are a bit too personal for me to share just yet.
The exhibition and final thoughts
For my exhibition I pulled out some of the drawings from the sketchbook and up on to the wall. Esther and I spent some time digging through the vast collection of frames we found at the residency and matched and organised them by size and colour to go with our drawings. What a difference a frame makes, right? Esther finally won the argument that we’ve been having that my drawings Do look nice and not at all like 5-year old did them (which is what I claimed for about a month, with conviction, thinking I had a point when insulting, sorry, critically reviewing my own work). I also created a little table set up in front of the framed work with my 2 sketchbooks so people can look through. I kept drawing at the desk on the opposite side while the gallery was open. It felt very cosy.
I was surprised by how many people came to the opening night. It was so lovely to meet everyone. This project has sparked so many interesting and meaningful conversations with all of you guys who came to the exhibition as well as my friends and colleagues back home. The topics were all about finding/searching for your personal voice / style, the creative process, having actual time to create, the struggles we go through to invent something new and how many challenges we actually have in common that are universal to all of us. This inspired me a lot so I would love to address those topics in the newsletters to come (also as to avoid writing an actual book within this first email). I didn’t expect at all that a lot of these interactions would feel so personal, people sharing openly about struggles they might have, aspirations, childhood stories, etc. I honestly couldn’t not have hoped for a better outcome! Thank you for sharing, it feels so good to have your trust!
The biggest and most meaningful realisation I had while doing the residency was that I never really felt like a “real” artist, even though it is literally my job. It is something I have felt for a long time but couldn’t quite explain. And so for the first time at the house - I saw myself as one. An artist! The trigger being - the unassuming but earnest picture at the top of this letter which Esther took of me inside our little workshop. When I look at it I see a kid, pondering at the table trying to figure things out and I love it. It’s a simple and unexpected picture but it means a lot to me. Esther and I had spent so much time drawing, getting up randomly and discussing ideas or asking for each other’s opinions and then going back to the drawing board. This is the process that I love the most about creating and the thing I hope I have in my work every single day of my life. Having time to think, draw, write, make stuff, talk with people, iterate, make weird noises until I have expressed what I want in a way that feels satisfying - that’s an artist. Voilà! I suppose what marked the difference was that this time around I was doing it for myself, rather than someone else and it meant something.
Conclusion
I am super happy and grateful that I got to have this experience at the residency and in Japan with Esther, my sisteru. I learned a lot and experienced so much, came back with loads of cool stories to tell. It inspired many wonderful conversations and I am looking forward to continuing with the making of this book, even though, truthfully I am also very nervous about sharing the process with everyone who subscribed to the newsletter as I have no idea how all of it will turn out in the end. Fingers crossed! :) To illustrate the anxiety - I wrote this letter 2 weeks ago and I’m only pressing send now. But anyways! If you read this far, I am grateful for your time and I hope you enjoyed it! Thank you Luis and Yuka Mendo for having me and to all of you for coming to see the show in person in Japan or to my house to see the drawings (thanks friends hehe) and to everyone for the wonderful conversations, questions and connections. I hope you are all doing wonderfully!
Speak soon,
Tones
This was such a wonderful read and was really exciting to see your sketches and interpretation of the Japanese landscape, coming to life. I’m in awe that you committed to doing something so incredibly thoughtful and cherished in such a short time, I felt waves of anxiety just thinking about the time pressure you had and the impending thought of having to exhibit! - but seems the concept pushed you to create something beautiful and pure within the environment and context of the residency!
Something you said jumped out at me a lot and I hope I remember it for myself too and brought a smile to my face, for you and you work when I read it:
“…this time around I was doing it for myself, rather than someone else and it meant something.”
Really looking forward to seeing (reading) future entries and your thoughts, feelings and discoveries made during the making of ‘The Finding and Gathering Book’! :)