Goro Sugita

Art Brokerage: Goro Sugita Japanese Artist: Goro Sugita is a Japanese artist who is known for his paintings of cranes and their habitats. All the paintings and drawings in Goro Sugita's strange, colorful exhibition at Gallery Okuda International bear the title "Man and Crane." The appellation also sums up the artist's career. Since first visiting a marshy area that is the habitat of the Japanese crane in Hokkaido, the northernmost island in Japan, the big birds have inspired his art. Sugita's initial encounter with the cranes was in the winter of 1970, and he has returned to the marshes every winter since to observe the tall birds, whose feathers are white except for on the black neck, throat, forehead and underside of the wings, and the distinctive red spot on top of the head. The crane's elegance and physical beauty, which have made it a symbol of good luck and happiness in Japanese culture, is merely a starting point for Sugita. The birds' appearance and movements inspire him to reflection rather than straightforward depiction. His paintings explore the psychic relationship between these graceful creatures and man. Anyone seeking meticulous, anatomically correct avian art a la John James Audubon should look elsewhere. Sugita's large, mysterious and dramatic oil paintings are abstract meditations on beauty, harmony, sexuality, environmental degradation and the fate of the planet. In many of them, there is nothing resembling a bird. He also uses a pointed instrument to score shapes into the paint, destabilizing the surface and pulling the eye into the background depths. Some of the shapes are abstract and geometric -- concentric circles, for example. Others are figurative, depicting stylized cranes on the wing. Sugita also uses a recurrent egglike sphere as a symbol for the spirit of the crane and for the planet. Paintings wanted.