This unique-state artist's book titled  'seeing air'  is a collection of pencil drawings about clouds and movement of air.  Air itself being invisible.  What we see and feel is the combination of moisture and movement.   I'm a cloud watcher - always looking skywards at the patterns and forms of the moisture in the air - ever changing, ever fascinating.  Nothing can be more uninteresting than a clear blue sky.   

My drawing practice is one of looking, seeing and recording details of the natural world around me.  Noticing.  Drawing substantiates my place in this vast network of interconnection and mystery. It allows me to be a witness and to engage - through stillness, contemplation and the simple process of making marks on paper. 

The relationship between what the eye sees and what the hand translates onto paper is my considered and personal response to the world around me.  

Desire for an intimate relationship with the natural environment is part of the human psyche and time spent in the study of weather changes and nature is in direct contradiction to the immediacy of gratification in this electronic age.  My drawings evolve at a timeless human pace.  I make slow art. 

I had been a jeweller and cloisonne enameller for more than 40 years when in 2014 I began concentrating on drawing as my major artistic activity.  My work, both in metal and on paper, has always been primarily about the environment - the wonder, complexity and interconnectivity that exists around us.  Seen and unseen.  

I love the simplicity of pencil on paper.  No process, no fuss, just the hand and eye of the artist.   Looking and seeing.  There is an immediacy in drawing - using simple earth materials (graphite or charcoal) to express a full range of dark and light, detail and broad stroke, observation and emotion.  

It is a truth that are all just passing through and that our lives are a tiny nanosecond in a vast continuum of eternal time.  To be here in this moment in this world is a beautiful gift and a precious thing.

- Carolyn Delzoppo, 2022

One could say that a work of art is usually aerial in its thematic evocation, or in its grounding in a material support. Carolyn Delzoppo's artworks bring the two together to create an imaginary world that is at once destabilizing and vaporous, profoundly delicate and sensitive.

It is hard to ignore how Delzoppo’s imagery is explicitly linked to wind, the titular theme of this issue of Venti. All the flora offered by the artist’s delicate hand to our contemplation through her artist book illustrations is displayed in forms that are each lighter than the one preceding. Downy dandelions swept away by the wind, gramineous grass bent under the weight of a wind that we can only imagine as being maritime, cottony clouds in motion, whirling ballet of whistling leaves. Delzoppo’s imagination, although sometimes quite solidly vegetal, is a strip of organza – black and white, studded with red and blue – and offers an unmistakably twirling landscape. Tree trunks rub shoulders with treetops, breezy branches resonate with the waves, and Carolyn Delzoppo’s drawings carry us everywhere, like a fine particle of powder or of dust in the air. Through the journey of these works, we are lucky enough to be transformed into birds: swooping from exotic plants dripping in the air to wooly-fluffy clouds, rarely putting a foot on the ground – or only as an architect, picking up the finest branches necessary for its nest. 

But for whoever's imagination goes beyond the representative presence of these works, this aerial imagery is also material, for the presence on paper of these works is in motion. The format of the book, long, thin, lying like a landscape, whispers to our eyes all the sounds and vibrations of the horizon. The balance of opacity and transparency, a force that the artist controls beautifully, plays with substance as much as it plays with disappearance. The words even, when there are any, are entertained by this paradox as much as by the often-total sensitive experiences to which the winds can lead us. 

Throughout Delzoppo’s work, the ripping of the paper and the mosaic format echo one of the messages that runs through “Wind”: that the air and the wind have no limits, no edges, no boundaries. They are, for those who want to feel them, envision them, or listen to them, of a liberating uncontrollability. They are the symbol par excellence of entanglement, one of the most heuristic of the intertwining, and bearers of good auguries, of distribution, and of fertility, and of germination. The winds are finally at home everywhere, partners in both shriveling and regrowing, as well as a soothing proof that neither black nor white are ever acting in the world without blending into shades.

- Léa Fougerolle

Susumu Takashima’s works are drawings made with brush and ink, colored pencils, and metal point, all materials that create lines that change in thickness. Takashima was born in Kobe City, Hyogo Prefecture in 1959 and grew up in Kakogawa City, Hyogo Prefecture. His father was an architect. Between the ages of five and twelve, he attended an art class taught by Keihachiro Fujimoto, a disciple of Masakazu Horiuchi, the pioneer of Japanese abstract sculpture. There, he learned his current technique of drawing parallel lines in freehand. His notebooks from his teenage years are full of line drawings made with this technique. However, he felt dissatisfaction because he was still drawing with ballpoint and felt-tip pens, both of which produce lines with constant thickness. After graduating from the Department of Architecture at Musashino Art University, he studied painting at Musashino Art School for two years and at Instituto Allende in Mexico for one year. In 1989, Takashima noticed that lines made with brushes just dipped in ink naturally gave works depth as they became thinner. In the following year, he discovered that lines made with colored pencils — inverse lines made with brush and ink — were thinnest immediately after sharpening and became thicker thereafter. It would take him roughly eight years of trial and error to succeed in creating works based on his discoveries. In 2000, he won a grand prize at the 14th Fine Art Exhibition in Tama, and his work is in the collection of Ome Municipal Museum of Art. Today he regularly holds exhibitions in Tokyo and San Francisco, while exhibiting at art fairs in Japan and other countries.