About
Shirley Asano Guldimann is a native Angeleno, and her artistic style is undoubtedly inspired by her Japanese heritage. Her spare drawings, inventive figurative paintings, and expressive abstracts meld a dramatic, narrative Western tradition with a more delicately suggestive, restrained Eastern aesthetic
Shirley grew up with a creative extended family that included a paternal grandmother and maternal aunt, each in their own way bringing a Japanese aesthetic of beauty into their lives in humble ways. Arranging a graceful ikebana flower arrangement or allowing a plant to trail from the top of a bookcase were small aesthetic accents that still resonate with the artist, providing a lyrical and poetic inspiration to much of her work.
Artist Statement
My artwork strives to convey the strange beauty of life and capture meaning in this fleeting existence.
For whatever success I have achieved, I thank Joe Blaustein, artist and UCLA art instructor, who taught me both the ‘rhetoric of art’ and that each work is an existential journey. He also created a wonderful community of artists who to this day encourage each other. Most of all, heartfelt and immeasurable thanks to my husband, John, who has engaged in art since boyhood. He says he started me on the art path by showing me his drawing of a naked woman and a fish when we were both in law school. My initial reaction, he remembers with amusement, was not encouraging, but the image he drew stuck with me, like a grain of irritating sand giving rise to a pearl in an oyster.