ART LIVES TORIDE Where Art Is Born

I have an art book coming out soon, and I was asked to paint the POP for it. I usually do live painting, so I can paint while talking like this.

I was born and raised here, and studied forestry at the Department of Forest Science, at the Faculty of Agriculture, Tottori University.
After working as a picture book editor in Tokyo, I started working on pictures. I guess 8 years ago. My mother passed away and my father will be alone, so I’ll be the one coming back. The forest is right in front of me, so there are a lot of birds and animals. My motifs are often based on nature, and it is nice to be able to paint in this quiet environment.

The reason my father and mother moved here was also because of the forest.
When I was little, I played in the forest every day. I slided on bare soil or collected clay layers to make pottery. Those things Idid for fun.
I also made small humans out of clay and spent a day making a story. I like small figures because they make the world relatively larger. I think it is my basic sensibility to want to feel the vastness of the world.

I started painting when I was 29 years old. At that time, there was Mixi, wasn’t there?
I thought that writing was too much, so I started drawing and submitting pictures. What can I say, it’s quick. Words take time to form a meaning, and there is no technique to express it in music. If I quickly draw what I feel is a beautiful picture, it comes across quickly. I am impatient, so I thought I was suited for it.

* Mixi: an online Japanese social networking service

I like music very much. I especially liked a band called Fishmans for a while, and I was crazy about them. In the beginning, I was painting pictures like music, like Fishmans, as a theme. For example, if someone smokes a cigarette and you think it’s beautiful, most people will sing along. But they express themselves with guitar tones and lyrics that make you feel it .Rather than painting the scenery as it is, I try to paint something that is close to the emotion I felt at that time.I was really inspired by that way of doing things.

While I became friends with the various band members, they asked me to do live painting.More and more people are doing things similar to public productions at festivals, but since I started at a live music club, I am conscious of the fact that I am doing it as a performance. I felt that if I could make the richness of that time and the sharing of that time with the people there into entertainment, it would be like live painting.

Sound reverberates, scenery becomes visible , and I begin to paint. The colors are somehow decided. Then the drama comes to my mind. You’ll see a girl all alone, or the city in the distance. By developing songs, I improvise and change painting more and more.. The audience looks forward to seeing how Kondo will paint a picture with this music. There was a time when I was doing about 150 a year, but it was different every time.
That was a good thing. If it’s someone I’m working with for the first time, I try not to put in any prior information about them. It’s a tremendous tension, but the first time is the only time. I try to savor it. That way, miracles are more likely to happen.

It is different from the way of painting for an art book and has a very different attitude.
My basic way of thinking comes from nature, so one of my motifs is the feelings I get from nature. I also used to work on picture books, so I like to work on finding a story, not an abstract picture. I have a backbone as a Japanese person, too. A small rock floating in the garden looks like an island. I think I have inherited the Japanese sensibility to look at things in this way.

If I　stare at it, I can see the story. I see this stain on the sliding door, and I think, “This is a floating planet, and it would be nice to have a girl sitting on it. Or, “I’m holding an umbrella, but it looks like it’s going to stop raining soon, and then the birds will fly in.

The more I draw, the more I want to try next. I leave the painting incidentally, so it’s like looking at clouds. I think, “This is the shape I see today. I never get tired of it. Recently, I have been invited to Taiwan and other foreign countries. I will probably spend more time working in other places, but I think I will always live here.