Kappa Senoo (1930) is a Japanese graphic designer, a successfull set designer, essayist and novelist. A 1997 autobiographical book depicting his childhood, “Shonen H” (“A boy called H: A Childhood in Wartime Japan” in English) became a best-seller in Japan.
Since 1976 he began the publication of a series of volumes each entitled “Kappa peeps (…)”, showing his travel sketches. The books associate descriptive text to black and white illustrations and feature a large number of bird-eye perspective views of interior rooms, a technique employed by the author in order to describe carefully every single item he finds. This technique obviously reminds us Atelier Bow Wow‘s famous technical perspectives collected in the “Graphic Anatomy” publication.
In “Kappa peeps Europe”, published after his one-year stay in the continent, the author obsessively depicted in plan and perspective every hotel room he slept in. The drawings are combined with all kind of written information (addresses and numbers, as well as small notes about the countries habits). Apart from the rooms, he also drew trains interiors, uniforms, food, monuments and everyday objects. The subjects were analyzed through different drawing projections with a definite and meticulous style. A special attention was addressed to the depiction of toilets, a subject to which he later dedicated a whole book.
After the success of this first publication he started an ongoing series of 12 titles, so far. The other books show a growing attention to details and an attempt to visually describe an ever larger spectrum of subjects: from recipes to vehicles, machines, maps, landscapes and basically everything arousing Kappa’s infinite curiosity.
Copyright of the images owned by the author
Books available on Amazon.
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