REVIEWS

Yanagi is one of the best-selling and most sought-after artists in Ireland today. He has studios in both Ireland and Spain.

Yanagi first began exhibiting his work in 1984 and in the following decade lived and worked in Minneapolis, Oslo, Barcelona and London moving to Clonakilty, Ireland in 1995.


Life in the slow lane
Yanagi exchanged a busy London life for the tranquility of the West Cork countryside. The change had a profound effect on him. Cityscapes were replaced by large, abstract, meditational watercolours celebrating life in its myriad forms.

Channelling the wonders of the world
The beauty of Ireland opened a floodgate. Inspiration poured in from the heavens, the ocean, the rolling fields, from rivers, streams, rocks and ponds. A constant theme was the exploration of the holographic nature of the Universe, where the microcosm reflects the macrocosm and vice versa. The paintings were often ambiguous. Was this life viewed through a telescope or a microscope? What was not in any doubt though was the awe and wonder they captured.
They bring to mind the words of William Blake in Songs of Innocence:

"To see a World in a grain of sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity
In the Palm of your hand
And Eternity in an Hour."

“Yanagi is an artist who creates meditative, semi-abstract paintings inspired by the outer landscape of sky, stars, planets, the fall of light and water.
I first encountered Yanagi in my gallery, Oisin Arts, over ten years ago when he presented me with three paintings to be framed for the Guinness Collection. I marvelled at his use of watercolour. Most artists would have fallen into the trap of creating "mud" by the use of such an amount of watercolour, he didn't. At that time I assumed they were abstract scenes, but three weeks later I visited his studio in West Cork and learnt about the man and his subject matter. 

His work follows the tradition of American abstract painters such as Rothko, Newman and Motherwell, whilst insisting on notions of subject and place that his predecessors had attempted to banish. Yanagi is, in some respects, a landscape artist in the same tradition as Constable. However Yanagi's landscape does not rely on the familiar construction of horizon, sky, middle ground and fore ground to anchor the scale of the subject matter. Instead, whilst taking his inspiration from the natural world he frees himself from the limitations imposed by scale and form. One of my favourite paintings at Oisin Arts is Yanagi’s Life in the Stream both for the energy produced by its range of colours and for its ability to convey the movement of the stream.”
- Donal McNeela, Managing Director, Oisin Gallery, Dublin

“Yanagi continues to gaze at distant stars, whilst at the same time looking at rocks, pools, rivers and seas. He challenges the traditional viewpoints and subjects of the Irish landscape artist, yet also adds greatly to that tradition. He continues to find the intimate in the infinite and brings a sense of human scale and comprehension to the vastness of space.”
- Paul Kelly