NOBU HAIHARA             

 Nobu Haihara is a multi-talented artist known for his super-realist images of giant Martinis and shakers, scotch bottles and glasses brimming with color and reflectivity. He is an accomplished landscape painter, portrait artist, super-realist and graphic artist as well. But his energy and ideas keep him constantly active and evolving as a painter.

Nobu credits his parents as early influences on his artistic future. While growing up in Kokura, Japan his Mother handmade many of the things they used and decorated with in the family home. Her boundless creativity was not lost on the young Nobu, who often had to be scolded for drawing on any and all available surfaces. He absorbed Japanese and Western culture like a sponge, especially books on Monet, DaVinci and Michelangelo. He visited Museums and trained in traditional Japanese arts; but it was in his father’s grocery store that Nobu found his calling.

Brightly colored and graphically enticing images bombarded him as he helped open packages of dry goods from America and arrange them on shelves to be sold. Their pure marketing effects were powerful and mesmerizing to the young Nobu, who began to see the advertisements as art. He studied them, drew them and incorporated their ideas into his own emerging style.

In school Nobu Naihara eagerly studied both classical and modern art, and set out to master them both. After graduating from Hiroshima Economic University, Nobu immigrated to the United States in 1986.

By the early 1990’s Nobu had learned the practical art of silk-screening and was successfully reproducing and selling his artwork as serigraphs and mono-prints. He developed a style reminiscent of the historical Japanese Ukiyoe wood-block prints that combine images with poetry and verse; and he produced and sold silk-screen prints of clocks, telephones, wine bottles and Martini’s — with their history or recipes hand-written across them in a decorative narrative style.

Nobu continued developing a distinct and personalized style of his own. Painting in both acrylic and oil paints – as well as developing his skills as a sculptor and photographer – Nobu applied his new knowledge and techniques to producing his own cutting-edge modernist images that explore the boundaries between commercial and fine arts.

Nobu today is stretching the envelope again with his super-realist images of giant Martini’s and shakers, scotch bottles and glasses brimming with color and reflectivity. His crystal cut-glass images dazzle us with their realism and depth of field. His compositions are balanced and yet fluid. Dynamic perspectives are used to capture our attention and imagination.

The remind us of both of Nobu’s early influences: Renaissance and Pop Art. Dark brooding backgrounds, enlivened by and engulfed in bold modern color spring from the canvas, entertaining us, fascinating us, while they urge us to join in the moment of celebration.

Icons of modernity are stirred, not shaken, by the artist into rich fantasies and awesome reality.

Nobu now has his work in the personal collections of President George W. Bush; Laker owner Jerry Buss and Hall-of-famers Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Jerry West, Jamaal Wilkes and the late Chick Hearn. He has been commissioned by Mao Daichi, Japan’s leading musical star; and by NBC and the FOX Network which have used his artwork in set-designs for “Ally McBeal” and ”3rd Rock From The Sun”. Nobu has been honored with Exhibitions in New York, Sausalito, Beverly Hills, Hiroshima, Yamanashi and Fukuoaka, Japan.

Nobu Haihara’s new series of paintings and giclées are represented only at selected Fine Art Galleries in the United States and in Japan.

Other images by Nobu can be found on display at the Rio Suites or Las Vegas Hilton in Las Vegas, the Hotel Nikko Sapporo in Hokkaido and the Radisson Miyako in Osaka , Japan; the Gladstone’s, Morisawa and Tenkai restaurants in Universal City, California ; and the Miyabi Club in Gardena, California.