A talented art and design student recently stunned Japanese social media with his collection of delicious-looking sushi made exclusively of stone.
Hama, a student of the Joshibi University of Art and Design, in Kanagawa, Japan, has been exhibiting his stunning stone sushi at various universities across his country, to great success. And it’s easy to see why; his work is absolutely amazing, with some bite-sized pieces looking so realistic that you can hardly tell them apart from the real thing.
Akie Nakata describes herself as a “stone artist”, but there is more to her craft than simply painting river stones into familiar animal shapes. Every one of her pieces goes through a complex process that begins with choosing the right stone and continues with bringing out the life in it.
The Japanese artist, who goes by Akie on social media, has a very special way of looking at looking at stones. While most of us choose to ignore them, she considers them similar to living organisms, in that there is a rich history behind them and they all have a story to tell. She is just someone enabling that story to come out with her paintbrush. She believes that every stone she chooses in turn chooses her, giving her the ok to paint what she sees on it. Akie feels that her art is a collaborative effort of hers and the stones’, and she always shows her respect by never altering or processing a stone to better suit her design.
Maybe “stone paintings” isn’t the best phrase to describe the amazing artworks of Stefano Furlani, but it’s so unusual that I just didn’t know what to call it. The Italian artist basically searches for geometrically appropriate stones on the beach and arranges them to create complex compositions.
Stefano Furlani discovered this fascinating art form while playing with his son Davide, when he was three years old. They would scour the beach for strangely shaped stones and then assemble them into all kinds of shapes and designs, on the sand, under an umbrella. As time passed and they both got better at this ‘game’, they started creating more and more intricate and detailed artworks, and at one point, Stefano started feeling disappointed that the artworks he and his son had worked so hard to create got washed out by the sea or trampled on by other people. So he started creating these stone compositions on hard canvases and preserving them as proper works of art.
