Ray Yoshida
| Ray Yoshida | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Raymond Kakuo Yoshida October 3, 1930 Kapaa, Hawaii |
| Died | January 10, 2009 (aged 78) Kauai, Hawaii |
| Nationality |
 United States
|
| Education | University of Hawaii, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Syracuse University |
| Known for | Painting, Printmaking, Collage |
| Movement | Chicago Imagists |
Raymond "Ray" Kakuo Yoshida (October 3, 1930 – January 10, 2009) was a Chicago artist known for his paintings and collages, and for his contributions as a teacher at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1959 to 2005. He was an important mentor of the Chicago Imagists, a group in the 1960s and 1970s who specialized in distorted, emotional representational art.
Yoshida was born in Hawaii and returned there after 2005 when his health began to fail. He studied at the University of Hawaii, but was drafted into the army during the Korean War. He resumed his studies in Chicago, and received degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Syracuse University.
His paintings are strongly influenced by comics and his personal collection of folk art and found objects. His collages are strongly graphic, placing "tiny, oddly shaped details of architecture, fabric, hairdos and other unidentifiable elements" in ordered rows of fragments and tiers . Critic Ken Johnson called his collages "formally captivating, dreamily strange and comically absurd." Both he and his work are referred to as enigmatic, mysterious, and witty.
Yoshida created paintings in the early 1960s, and developed the "comic collage" in the later years of this decade. He also made paintings that incorporated elements from the comics. During the 1960s as well he began to build his personal collection of objects and images by self-taught and folk artists, installing these at his home. In the early 1970s, he created works which often featured abstracted objects; his work from the mid-1970s to 1980s incorporated a stronger figural sense. Yoshida returned to comic collage pieces in the 1990s and early 2000s, and produced a series of oil paintings in his late years. Scamper, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of the artist's comic collage paintings.
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