FRAGMENT by 白樺兎師春

Let me preface this by coming clean: I hate, hate, HATE furry, anthro, and anything that has to do with it. It's an instinctual, visceral kind of hate - which is both strange and logical, in a way, when you consider I'm a big animal lover. I systematically avoid anything that has to do with anthro and furry, Western or otherwise, and would actually rank it lower than loli and guro. Enuff said.

I was, therefore, very disappointed when I unpacked a copy of Shirakaba Toshiharu's Fragment, a fairly thick book of the artist's pencil sketches between 2001 and 2004. I must admit that disappointment was partially my fault: being one of the few purchases I actually didn't over-research, therefore didn't realize that Shirakaba Toshiharu is mostly known for his anthro art - which, to his credit, is actually very good (here is the Pixiv), as well as his children's illustrated books. I really liked the cover and the page count was high, so I just went for it.

The book is roughly 100 pages (unnumbered), pencil on a fairly thick, brown paper, glued spine. Aside from a very short closing note, the whole publication consists of unsorted, small sketches, usually six or seven per page. Almost all sketches depict a variety of anthropomorfic woodland creatures in forested environments: they are, as the title suggests, fragments, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the ordering. While this gives the book almost the feel of an actual sketchbook, it also encourages dispersion: many of the sketches look all exactly the same, and the eye tends to wander after a while. You decide if these points are a plus or a minus.

The real problem lies elsewhere. While it's been a long and honored tradition for artists to share their sketchbooks with the rest of the world (think Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo), they are not always fair, indicative deptictions of what the 'actual' art looks like. There are degrees of separation; and, personally, I like sketches that possess a nugget of what the artist's full pieces look like.

The fact is, Toshiharu's best rendered artwork scarcely resembles his sketches (and I'm not talking about degress of completion, I'm talking about arrangement, construction, depth and chiaroscuro); but it also rarely includes furry or anthro. Consider this, for example:

 It's in color, it has great depth and ana almost monumental composition, and it features no furry. It disregards his anthro art's mostly whimsical nature, trading it for a far more convincing arcane, mysterious aura.

The final result being, hand't I bothered digging around a bit, I would have simply assumed Shirakaba Toshiharu to be a middle-of-the-pack furry artist; while he is, actually, a multilayered and evocative artist whose work is very reminescent of European Magical Realism (Fuchs, Poumeyrol, etc.).

Concluding, the thing is: had I been the artist, maybe I wouldn't have released this sketchbook. It doesn't really give us much regarding the artist's process, and it doesn't represent fairly Toshiharu's oeuvre. Then again, who knows? I haven't found a mention of FRAGMENT on the artist's web site, so maybe he just nuked his early stuff from history once he went pro, like many other dōjinka do.