Tetsuya Ishida

Monkey and Seal recently had the incredible pleasure of discovering the work of Tetsuya Ishida, a contemporary Japanese painter. The store that Seal works at recently started carrying a collection of his work and when she showed Monkey, he was literally speechless.

His work is hauntingly beautiful, commenting on modern Japanese life. His topics range from the life of a salaryman to consumption to alienation and loneliness. Each painting was a self-portrait of the artist in the thick of it. He recently died in April from a train accident which is suspected to be a suicide.


Truly a great talent that will be missed, Monkey feels like this collection of work by Tetsuya-san is super inspiring and invaluable to the Monkey and Seal library.

Tetsuya does what Monkey ultimately wants to do with his art. By combining social commentary, politics, creepiness, and magical realism, Tetsuya says something deeply profound that resonates with one's soul and stays with you.

While Monkey's work currently explores the same themes but with a more humorous bent while using the interplay between text and images, he wants to eventually create something as moving and powerful as Tetsuya.

Monkey and Seal both highly recommend checking out more of Tetsuya's work - it is a simply stunning collection that finds beauty in the horrors of contemporary Japanese life.

Funny chimp loves his magic show

If you ignore the fact that there are distinct differences between a chimp and a monkey (yes, in terms of cognitive ability, Monkey would prefer to be Chimp, but it doesn't have that same ring to it), this video of a chimp watching a magician is perfect for us to share.

You have magic, funny sound effects, a silly chimp that loves watermelon, and Japanese television. If there was a seal and the animals were painting, you'd basically have our lives. Monkey isn't sure what he likes more, the fact that the chimp seems to love watermelon as much as he does, the intelligence of the chimp's reactions, or that the editors (in typical Japanese fashion) put sound effects to every single one of the chimp's movements. Sometimes Monkey wishes people had sounds effects like that.

PS - The video is in Japanese, but you don't need to understand the language to enjoy it :)

Saturday fun+ Etsy wishlist

This Saturday Monkey + Seal had the pleasure of heading out to SPACE gallery on Polk to check out a gallery event put on by SIR, a cutting-edge Japanese-living-in-SF show. If anything, you need to check out their website to hear some awesome music that plays when you load their site. We were super lucky that Seal got handed a flyer by Lavit Sea, who was on hand to display a painting and do some on-the-spot watercolor portraits. Also, one of Monkey's friends AKANE was there with some cool abstract pieces. The drinks were also tasty (although not as strong as Monkey might have liked), and Monkey + Seal had a great time overall.


Earlier in the day, Monkey got the chance to make a quick trip out to the Center for the Book's Roadworks, where Megan from Aviary Press was one of the featured artists. She's starting a new line of letterpressed cards based on strange sea creatures like this Southern Bobtail Squid. Awesome stuff! Monkey also got to run into friends Dutch Door and New Lights! Yay!


Additionally, Monkey was browsing Etsy and found this little gem (shown above) in one of the treasuries. ATHD, the creator of the piece, also has some amazing (and expensive) other pieces of jewelry. If Monkey + Seal were into jewelry (we're sorta minimalist on the jewelry), and had the cash, we'd totally be down with some of her stuff.

Last but not least, Monkey will be working in a collaboration with another designer to do a new screen-printed poster based on typography. We're thinking it'll be one color, edition of 50, perhaps with some color variants thrown in for good measure. More details when we're closer to printing!