Noe Tanigawa is from Wailupe Valley, O’ahu, Hawai’i. Her works are in corporate and private collections in Hawai’i, London, Tokyo, and New York City. An award winning journalist, Noe reports on art, culture and other topics for Hawai’i Public Radio. Find a full bio, resume and more, including “Wellsprings”, an audio exploration on the theme of Water, at www.noetanigawa.com .
Noe has worked in various media including clay, cement, fiberglass, resin, fabric, wax, video, charcoal, and oil paint. Projects have ranged from site specific installations to wall art. Recently, Noe’s paintings have largely been representational lotus gardens or abstracts in a series of Pacific Perspectives.
The aim of the lotus gardens is an immersion in light. The flowers dance in a space suffused with light energy. Large scale pieces are done on canvas or lutrador, a synthetic fabric that resembles rice paper. Pendant works in wax, translucent and virtually three dimensional, add a sensual accent, sometimes with bees modeled in wax or with gold leafed pollen grains that waft about the garden.
The Pacific Perspectives paintings begin with forms from nature: coral, sponge formations, tree limbs, ripples. These forms are manipulated and presented using contemporary image making techniques like oil painting, encaustic, aerosol, stencils, and fine line drawing. The idea is to explore new approaches to challenges and opportunities.
