Susumu Kamijo

Susumu Kamijo is renowned for his striking drawings and paintings of poodles that play with line, shape, and color. Characterized by a graphic, hard-edged style, these portraits portray canines as noble, glamorous, and even powerful, as in Chasing (2017), which sold for $94,500 at auction in 2021. 

Kamijo received his MFA from the University of Washington, where he met fellow painter Jonas wood; the pair collaborated on Kamijo's first catalogue Poodles (2017). Since he began portraying poodles in 2014, Kamijo has continued to hone his style, exploring patterns and marks like cross-hatching to add texture and rhythm to swaths of color. While he originally favored using pastel pencil and oil crayon on Coventry cotton rag paper, he has also immortalized poodles on canvas and in vinyl and oil paint.