Shinro Ohtake

After a much needed spring clean of my studio I re-discovered a whole lot of interesting things. I came across the work of Shinro Ohtake again: Ohtake was inspired to make 'street books' by an old man he met in London, who collected matchbooks and glued them into pages of a notebook. On his website it says his books are 'intense travel scrapbooks crammed with discarded cultural artifacts-scavenged tickets, snapshots, tags, currency, newspapers and other mass-produced printed matter shrugged off by popular culture. They are sculptural, multi-colored, excessive layerings of found images and objects that interact with his own painting and drawing before he seals them with coats of wax, stain, and varnish, plastic or fiberglass.'