Mayu Arai | Painter | Born in 1986 in Chiba, Japan.
Graduated from Aoyama Gakuin Women's Junior College, Department of Art in 2007.
She has loved drawing since she was a child.
For various reasons, she stopped painting once and started working mainly in the hospital-ity industry after graduating from junior college.
In 2015, facing death was an opportunity for her to start painting again, while studying on her own.

- 2021/ "Yakiniku/Shabu-Shabu Gudomito" mural art production

Artistic Statement:
What Mayu Arai wants to express most as an artist is the preciousness and beauty of "things we take for granted" that exist around us. She feels that by focusing on the fragili-ty of things that we forget about unless we are constantly aware of them, her works gain depth. She approaches her work with a conscious effort to express through the margins of her work and the balance of the painting as a whole the presence of mind that takes good things and sublimates them into something even more wonderful. Her influences have included the Japanese calligrapher and abstract painter Momohong Shinoda and Helen Frankenthaler, famous for her staining technique. The delicate yet bold expressions of these women have been very inspiring and have influenced her own style.
One of the characteristics of Mayu Arai's paintings is that she is not obsessed with a single piece of artwork. As a result of her pursuit of what she wants to express, she has devel-oped a style in which she uses a variety of techniques.　She often uses more than one technique in a single work, such as mixed media, acrylic paint, watercolor, and pastel. By combining unconsciously spontaneous expressions, such as the movement of water and lines, and consciously created expressions, like layers, she adds depth to her works and conveys to the viewer a sense of comfort and enjoyment in thinking. She is inspired by ordinary sights, objects, sounds, scents, and imaginary worlds, and expresses the atmos-phere she senses through her filter.
What is beauty? What is it that moves the heart? She is constantly searching for the "ex-istence of art" in today's capitalist world, and continues to pursue an evolving form of ex-pression while enjoying chance encounters.