Art & Inspiration letters from NIGHTEͶ (Nathan Guilhot)
This is not just a newsletter — it's my personal magazine documenting my creative journey.
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Good morning Reader!
Long time no see, isn't it? I would like to apologize right away for the last two missing weeks of this newsletter. I hope you were not worried :)
It's been almost a year since I started this newsletter, and it's the first time I miss an issue without warning. Oops!
Let's get back on track now, as you can imagine I have a lot to share with you!
But first! It's now overdue for a new winner of our monthly giveaway to be chosen :)
In case you don't know, every beginning of the month a random subscriber is picked to win a free print! This is actually the only way to get a print of my illustration (unless you bump into me).
I'll be sending an email to one of you a few hours after this email is sent, so watch your inbox!
What happened in the last two weeks!
As you might know if you’ve been following the last two issues, I was very far from home recently; I had a very long vacation all across Japan!
This was an incredibly intense and beautiful trip, and I can’t wait to share with you what I’ve seen. But there was one crucial thing I was missing: my laptop!
In order to pack lightly I decided to not bring it at all, and rely on my phone for most tasks. This went alright for the most part, writing is easy enough, but I had never before edited a whole newsletter on mobile; and it was way more complicated than I thought!
I’ll spare you the details, but what I use to format the weekly issue is not adapted to mobile at all: basic functionalities like adding a heading don’t fire all the time, I couldn’t find a way to resize and optimize the images, and the cursor sometimes would jump to a different place in the paragraph!
Now, I could have made it work with enough determination (and cybercafés are a thing), but as I was so busy with the trip itself I preferred to focus on it while I was there. And this way I can show you everything properly now that I’m back :)
This is just a little peek behind the curtain in case you were worried; we’re all good now, back to the schedule!
My favorite pictures from Japan
This 2-week trip to Japan wasn’t only an occasion to relax and do sightseeing, but it was a lifelong dream of mine to go here to gather my own art reference.
I’m sure that looking at my art you can tell that Japan is a big inspiration of mine 😄 It’s part of the reason why I love to draw wires!
And while I was there I bought myself a used camera to capture as much interesting reference as possible, and here is the result!
Those picture are compressed to fit into your inbox, but I hope to share sharper version on my website someday!
I’m pretty happy about this camera (a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF7 if you are curious), it seems to be a pretty good entry point for complete beginners like myself.
The lens could be better (I don’t have any way to zoom!), but this is miles better than my old phone.
Those stairs lead to a peaceful shrine
What I love about those streets is the clutter, the infinite amount of details you can dive into.
As an artist this is of great interest to me, but even just as a viewer I find it fascinating. And I’m not sure exactly why; maybe it’s a way to appreciate the mundane?
Look at those pipes! 🥹 Beautiful
Hakone Open Air Museum 🗻
After Tokyo, traveling to Hakone was a real breather; it was the highlight of our trip, even though the weather wasn’t good enough to see Mount Fuji!
But I wanted to share with you one unusual museum visit we made: the Hakone Open Air Museum.
It’s a contemporary sculpture museum, very far from what I usually like to visit, but I had a very nice time wandering around.
As you can expect, some of them were very opaque in terms of meaning, like these two hares fighting on a cross.
The flavor text was basically admitting "Hum, one can only wonder what this actually means 🤔"
Some other times there was no deep meaning at all: for example I loved the story behind one showing a kid with oversized boots; according to the flavor text, it was made simply because the artist’s son was playing with oversized shoes that he was using as reference.
It wasn’t pretentious, which is refreshing! And freeing in a sense; there’s no need to have a very deep message to make art.
At first I was like “why is this in a museum?”, but then I realized that saying this implies that art should be difficult to understand to be worthy of being shown.
Finally, art that doesn't need an introduction to be understood
But my favorite pieces were the ones that invite you to walk in their space and interact with them.
One fantastic example is the work by Japanese artist Toshiko Horiuchi Macadam, who creates huge interactive 100% hand-crocheted playgrounds that you can actually climb and play on!
I mean not me, only children were allowed, but it was very impressive to see!
It's even more impressive when you know she's making those structures by hand!
I'll conclude with some extra nature pictures from Hakone :)
I'm really loving the "macro" focus of this camera
And that's it for today!
I prefer not to overwhelm you with all the pictures and anecdotes I have in stock this week, so we will continue next week! Along with, of course, more of my art, now that I'm back home!
Before I go, let me share a song we heard on the radio right in the middle of our trip :)
