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Modern Landscape Painting The information-gathering abilities and easily changeable screens of simple gadgets are interesting. Our thoughts are always in sway, and our perceptions of both good and bad are easily influenced by information and our mood. Nowadays, real-time information can be easily acquired with just a thumb. The screen also changes with the lightest touch. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s modern. And all our standards of value will continue to change with newly-created industries. I produce paintings out of pieces that have been specially image-processed. I select images that have actually been photographed, and use them as a base from retouching to production. While combining multiple images of natural landscapes and plants, making use of the fluid characteristics of paint, and with motifs from decorative objects to organic things found in nature, I paint original landscapes as well as the ambiguity and instability in the moment a screen changes from one image to the next, and the uncertainty of the existence of both. Perhaps they could be described as easily changeable modern landscape paintings. I make paintings from everyday scenes. Not just pursuing scenery the Impressionist painters saw, but making the inconsistencies, the irrationality and fruitlessness sometimes lurking ironically in unremarkable scenes as beautiful as I can—that’s my attitude toward my own work in this modern day. Paintings are entertainment and visual art. You can’t recognize a painting with your eyes closed. And the history hidden within the painting expresses the painter’s thoughts. When I look at and enjoy artwork, I also value its materiality. You could say that the real pleasure of enjoying a painting is not only its theme, motif, or composition, but the brushstrokes of the painter, as you imagine their movements and what they were thinking. Walter Benjamin said that “Since photography was invented by Louis Daguerre, and this definitive technique of reproduction finally destroyed the aura of artwork, contemporary art has been moving toward allegorical expression like that of Baroque tragedy.” In producing my work, I use a digital camera, processing digital images and emulating them on the canvas. I’d like to think that the errors and material thickness that are created in that process are the potential and appeal of painting. As for how my current expression came to be, from 2007 to 2011, I expressed my own fantasy world figuratively. However, in 2012, when I made and reviewed a portfolio of my work and began new work, my brush would not move. This was because I felt that there was a limit to expressing my ideas at the stage I was at. I couldn’t expect to have a constructive future just by repeating the process of reproducing details of the images that came to my mind without looking at anything, as I had been doing. So, going back to work I made in the past, I reconsidered my favorite pieces, my work process, and the subject of “land and scene” I had used. These led to abstract expression focusing on the materiality of paint and on details, to production using digital images and processing technology, and to a theme of ridgelines and backgrounds. At first, I started with painting marbled lines on a pure white surface, and eventually these lines began to fill the canvas. It’s almost as if a force other than my own intent was at work. Perhaps it’s close to a comics artist saying something like “The story and characters grew, and there was development I didn’t expect.” I want to be honest with that pull. I accept things like distortions, happenstance, and unintended things that come about in the process of creating. Eventually, from a series of repetitions, a form is inevitably created. However, that form immediately begins to transform into shackles. I fight against the form I myself created, and then create some other form, sometimes building upon it. Virtual images made by digital images and the fiction that emerges from digital processing move through a filter—me—and create an allegory.
Modern Landscape Painting The information-gathering abilities and easily changeable screens of simple gadgets are interesting. Our thoughts are always in sway, and our perceptions of both good and bad are easily influenced by information and our mood. Nowadays, real-time information can be easily acquired with just a thumb. The screen also changes with the lightest touch. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s modern. And all our standards of value will continue to change with newly-created industries. I produce paintings out of pieces that have been specially image-processed. I select images that have actually been photographed, and use them as a base from retouching to production. While combining multiple images of natural landscapes and plants, making use of the fluid characteristics of paint, and with motifs from decorative objects to organic things found in nature, I paint original landscapes as well as the ambiguity and instability in the moment a screen changes from one image to the next, and the uncertainty of the existence of both. Perhaps they could be described as easily changeable modern landscape paintings. I make paintings from everyday scenes. Not just pursuing scenery the Impressionist painters saw, but making the inconsistencies, the irrationality and fruitlessness sometimes lurking ironically in unremarkable scenes as beautiful as I can—that’s my attitude toward my own work in this modern day. Paintings are entertainment and visual art. You can’t recognize a painting with your eyes closed. And the history hidden within the painting expresses the painter’s thoughts. When I look at and enjoy artwork, I also value its materiality. You could say that the real pleasure of enjoying a painting is not only its theme, motif, or composition, but the brushstrokes of the painter, as you imagine their movements and what they were thinking. Walter Benjamin said that “Since photography was invented by Louis Daguerre, and this definitive technique of reproduction finally destroyed the aura of artwork, contemporary art has been moving toward allegorical expression like that of Baroque tragedy.” In producing my work, I use a digital camera, processing digital images and emulating them on the canvas. I’d like to think that the errors and material thickness that are created in that process are the potential and appeal of painting. As for how my current expression came to be, from 2007 to 2011, I expressed my own fantasy world figuratively. However, in 2012, when I made and reviewed a portfolio of my work and began new work, my brush would not move. This was because I felt that there was a limit to expressing my ideas at the stage I was at. I couldn’t expect to have a constructive future just by repeating the process of reproducing details of the images that came to my mind without looking at anything, as I had been doing. So, going back to work I made in the past, I reconsidered my favorite pieces, my work process, and the subject of “land and scene” I had used. These led to abstract expression focusing on the materiality of paint and on details, to production using digital images and processing technology, and to a theme of ridgelines and backgrounds. At first, I started with painting marbled lines on a pure white surface, and eventually these lines began to fill the canvas. It’s almost as if a force other than my own intent was at work. Perhaps it’s close to a comics artist saying something like “The story and characters grew, and there was development I didn’t expect.” I want to be honest with that pull. I accept things like distortions, happenstance, and unintended things that come about in the process of creating. Eventually, from a series of repetitions, a form is inevitably created. However, that form immediately begins to transform into shackles. I fight against the form I myself created, and then create some other form, sometimes building upon it. Virtual images made by digital images and the fiction that emerges from digital processing move through a filter—me—and create an allegory.