A painter of Japanese heredity, Milt Kobayashi presently teaches figurative painting at the Scottsdale Artists' School in Scottsdale, Arizona. He was born in 1950 in New York City as a 3rd generation Japanese-American.
He moved from there first to Oahu, Hawaii and then to Los Angeles. There he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) after which he started work as an illustrator. However, his sketching style was not liked by the art market in Los Angeles seen from a commercial perspective and so he returned back to New York City in 1977.
On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art there, he was so impressed by the painting Juan de Pareja by Velasquez that completed changed the direction of his career seriously towards fine art. He then took up studying the work of Sargent, Chase, and Whistler all exponents of Velasquez's style of painting. The influence of Japanese painting on his mind was already in place by then. Especially the Ukiyo-e woodblock print style of the 17th century Japanese masters Sharaku, Utamaro, and Hokusai inspired him immensely.
Later on the work of Edgar Degas and Lautrec had a profound influence on his mind and he took up figurative painting as a vocation. Art critics see in his work great similarity with Edgar Degas in content and design. At the same time the Japanese masters' influence lingered on. As such you will find that patterns, use of negative space, harmonies of color, and design and composition are a major feature of his style of figurative painting.
Another feature of his paintings is that he almost always likes to get his subjects photographed. He then uses the photographs to paint the subjects at his own convenience especially late in the night. Although he does a bit of sketching, but most of his creativity is predominantly utilized directly on canvas on the spur of the moment.
His style of painting is very much different from his contemporaries and therefore all the more attractive. His work shows about him a fierce penchant for design and an objective curiosity about people. There is a sense of wickedness of balance, composition, and skilful calculation in his work that is almost unusually well-sourced and professional in its demeanor.
He loves to make use of light in his paintings. It may be to highlight a woman's expression or to expose intimacy in feelings. And there is an ethereal quality in all his paintings as his subjects are not those who live presently in this world. Yet they seem romantic, strange, mysterious, but all the same identifiable and recognizable.
In October 2008, the Bohemia Galleries in Gillygate in York, UK had the pleasure of hosting an exhibition of some of his best work for art lovers there. He is already a widely acclaimed artist in the United States and in Japan. He has won the US National Academy of Design's Ranger Purchase Award as also the Silver Medal from the Allied Artists.
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