You know how we always say we’re going to get back to something? Some artist, some subject, some mid-century murder spree? And then we never do? Kind of like when you were eight and your parents kept promising to let you buy a grizzly bear but always put you off until finally telling you they weren’t going to buy you one and never planned to? Well, we don’t want to be like your lying ass parents, so we’ve decided we need to be better about actually geting back to stuff we said we’d get back to. Consider it a twelve-step program of sorts, which we already started by keeping that five-year old promise about the naked diaries.
So here’s someone else we promised to revisit—Japanese illustrator Cohjizukin, whose poster for an Ed Wood triple bill we shared back in October. He painted the above poster for Federico Fellini’s I vitelloni, known in some circles as The Young and the Passionate, and Giulietta degli spiriti, aka Juliet of the Spirits. We knew nothing about Cohjizukin last year, but we’ve learned a few things. He’s actually award winning artist Kōji Suzuki, who was born in 1948, has had innumerable exhibitions, live painting events, published many books, and seemingly even has delved into music, releasing four albums in the 1990s.
He also likes creepy eyes. Everybody in this poster looks like they’re trying to drain your vital essence. We checked to see if either of these movies involved essence-draining, but they’re both comedy/dramas. Not sure Fellini would have approved of psycho faces on a poster for his films, but the art is amazing. Cohjizukin created it for a double-bill sometime during the 1990s, probably for some film festival or other. People were once able learn more about him by visiting his (also a bit scary) website, but it’s defunct now, and without Japanese would have been useless to you anyway. We’ll dig up more pieces from him later. That’s a promise we’ll keep.
