Popularity

After garnering rave reviews here for my work here, the famous "snif" picture was brought up (see comments on the former link above). While not Japan-related, it merits posting because I have one of the few extant copies left of the famous picture.

Said to be done during his Shiftwork Period, Dad's "Snif" conveys a message of harmony and universal understanding through juxtaposition of class-conscious, bourgeoise meta-norms (personified in the angular geometry of two dogs meeting for the first time) with a mundane, relativistic narrative of power-struggle and information-exchange symbolised via the spatial relationship of dynamic forms wrought by the force of the artist's deft penstrokes. The fine draftsmanship of the work belies the primal ruggedness of its overall message while slyly obfuscating the almost too obvious normative approach to pen-and-ink drawings taken by the artist to this theme (an approach said to be definitive of his style during that period).