BIO.
1969 Born in Tokyo
1992 Graduated from the Department of Oil Painting, Faculty of Art, Musashino Art University
1994 Completed oil painting course at Musashino Art University Graduate School of Art and Design

As a child, I was an introvert and loved to read, especially fantasy stories, and I think that's when I was inspired to start drawing. I also learned to play the piano and was familiar with music. I also joined the brass band at the age of 16. I feel that music has had a profound influence on my work.
I was in the art club in junior high school. It all started when I saw a Van Gogh exhibition in elementary school, and the Surrealist art books (by Magritte and Dali) I saw in the club room also had a strong influence on me.
My father started painting oil paintings at home, and that was what motivated me to try painting. I also had a desire to express myself, and I think that's what led me to music and art.
In the end, I chose painting because I felt that a “quiet” form of expression suited me. With music, you share time with the audience, and every moment is a performance.
For me, the method of expression suited me best to work alone, going through numerous experiments and failures, refining my work, and creating it.

While studying at Musashino Art University's Department of Oil Painting, I was searching for my own way of expression while completing my assignments. I learned tempera painting techniques in a painting composition class. It was during this time that I encountered a support that uses chalk as a base coat on a wooden panel. I was fascinated by the expressive power and beauty of the way paint soaked into the chalk support, and it has since become the basis of my work. I also liked the dry, light, matte texture of acrylic paints, rather than the heavy touch of oil paints, and used them until I graduated.
I majored in abstract painting at university. The reason was that what I wanted to express was something vague, and I didn't know what it was at the time, so I thought that a concrete image would be an obstacle.
The artists who influenced me as a student were Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miro, Arshile Gorky, Wols, Mark Rothko, Tapies, Cy Twombly, Friedrich, Toko Shinoda, and Tatsuoki Nanbata.
Michelangelo's notes and Klee and Kandinsky's theory on painting.
In particular, I was inspired by the “synesthesia of color and sound” in Kandinsky's theory on art, and tried to express musical paintings. This is why the subjects of my paintings became abstract. I don't have synesthesia myself, but I wanted to create a musical world and order in my paintings.

After graduating from graduate school, I continued to exhibit my works while working part-time.

Around 1997, I encountered water-soluble oil paints. They have a solid texture, can be diluted with water to create delicate expressions, and have a matte texture that gives them a calm luster, so I intuitively felt that they were perfect for my expression. I have been using them ever since. Until 2010, my style was to first draw a line or a circle in the center of a blank white canvas. I would stare at it for a while, visualize the direction of the force and air flow that spreads from what appeared there, and fix it with paint. The great power of nature, energy: the force that erupts mountains and moves the earth, the atmospheric flow that circulates the earth, and gravity that draws the stars closer and farther apart,and the images of the final works are varied.
As a result, I ended up going to art university, and I've been creating art to this day.
There are two works that inspired my current style. Both were inspired by infectious viruses.
The 2010 one was based on the Ebola virus, which was also the model for the movie “Outbreak.” It was simply the impact of the shape. The three rings seemed to me to have a meaning that was a metaphor for the power of nature. From that time on, my shapes became simpler, and my consciousness shifted towards the smaller world. My job also changed to working with microscopes, and the microscopic world became part of my daily life for me.

As I started to think about my work from a microscopic perspective, I became conscious of the fact that I was clearly depicting my subjects. At the same time, I considered why the microscopic world.
Some organisms at the microscopic level can exist independently, while others live as part of animals or plants. Many of them play an important role in the structure of our world through their daily lives, which we are unaware of. In other words, microscopic organisms are the foundation of the visible world.
Although we cannot see them, they exist in a very ordinary way and are closely related to us. Changes in our relationship with them have a huge impact on us.
The things I had been drawing up until then were very different from what I had been thinking. The definition of abstract painting:
I believe that the simple elements that make up a painting (= simple shapes such as lines and surfaces, color surfaces) have something in common with the world and the components of the living things that live there (= cells, microorganisms, molecules, atoms, etc.).
In fact, the feeling is not so different from when I paint abstract paintings.
However, although I use real images as reference, I paint only conceptually, so there are no paintings that exist, but one piece I painted in 2019 was later said to be the coronavirus. The unprecedented crisis that covered the world from the following year was confronted with an invisible entity, and it became
my trigger to become aware that I should clearly target the microscopic world.

TECHNIQUE:
The production of my works begins with creating a support, as used in tempera painting, on a wooden panel onto which cheesecloth is pasted with glue, on which I then make an emulsion paint using chalk.
I did not add white titanium pigment because I wanted to preserve the gray-white color of the chalk, but in recent years I have started adding it because the chalk has become more reddish.
Around 2016 I started using cotton and linen instead of cheesecloth.
As for materials, I mainly use water-soluble oil paints that dissolve in both oil and water. I dilute them with water before painting, but only when they are difficult to dissolve in water do I dilute them with water-soluble painting solution. I start painting by adjusting the base, so sometimes I use a base paint instead of paint. In recent years I have also used the traditional egg yolk medium of
tempera painting. I also use pigments, charcoal, ink, pastels, etc. as needed. Tempera painting's mixed technique and water-soluble oil paints have something in common in that they can both be used with water and oil, so they are easy to get used to.



SOLO EXHIBITIONS.
1996 Gallery K,Tokyo
1997 Gallery Q,Tokyo
1999 Gallery JIN,Tokyo
2008 SAN-AI Gallery,Tokyo
2010 SAN-AI Gallery,Tokyo
2018-20 SAN-AI Gallery,Tokyo
2022 SAN-AI Gallery,Tokyo
2024 SAN-AI Gallery,Tokyo

GROUP EXHIBITIONS.
2007 Michiko Arikawa／Kyoko Okuda Exhibition／Session House,Tokyo
2009 Memory vol,5／SAN-AI Gallery,Tokyo
Sino-Japanese Art Exchange Exhibition／Session House,Tokyo
2012 Sukiwa Western Painting Exhibition／Sukiwa,Tokyo
2013 Memory vol,18／SAN-AI Gallery,Tokyo
2014 Free Exhibition／Galerie VERGER,Tokyo
2018 fragment ／ SAN-AI Gallery,Tokyo
2016-20 Japan Collage Exhibition／Gallery K,Tokyo
2021-22 Beautiful time／Gallery K,Tokyo
2019 What color is the wind?／Gallery K,Tokyo

AWARDS.
1999 Selected for art competition 2000