ART LIVES TORIDE Where Art Is Born

Toride is my hometown. I spent my teenage years being quite mischievous, and there was even a time when I attended Yoshimoto’s (comedian) training school. I have loved drawing pictures since I was a little girl, so I thought that art might help me get into college, so I started going to a prep school in front of the station. I went to university in Kyoto and came back to Toride when I entered the graduate school of Tokyo University of the Arts.

Right around that time, I participated in the launch of a shared studio called Studio Koudai, where I worked for about seven years. It was exactly one year ago that I turned this room in Togashira into my studio. I feel like I am at the starting line, outside of my comfort zone that is too good to be true with friends all around me.

The new studio didn’t have to be in Toride, and in fact I looked for a lot of places regarding the access to Tokyo, parking, size, and so on. But this place was close to my ideal. I could live on the second floor, but I feel that less than 10 minutes walk in the morning and at night is refreshing in a good way.

I am currently painting the scenery of Kyoto. Kyoto is the town where I used to live when I was in college, and it seems that the number of tourists has decreased tremendously due to the Corona disaster. That is the kind of Kyoto I want to paint. Rather than wanting to depict the city of Kyoto, I wanted to depict the world we live in now through Kyoto, so I took some pictures a while ago.

I feel beautiful when man-made things and nature are mixed or interrelated. For example, a town with snow falling. I think the artifact is a human being, and I guess I am trying to depict the moment when humans and this world are in relationship with each other. I think I probably want to depict human beings. I consider the landscape as one person’s world. That is why I think I am interested in people.

My paintings are basically landscapes and portraits. The theme in my mind is “nothingness.” Zero. I paint portraits of freeters, and freeters have the image of people who have lost their jobs. But on the other hand, we could also say that they are people who are starting their work now. I believe that nothingness is also a starting point.

I started painting vacant stores because I thought they were the same as freelancers, but they developed into a town. Toride also has more vacant stores and the area in front of the station is under construction. People’s world changes day by day. There is no beginning and no end. I think that can express a kind of zero point.

The drawing process also starts with a thin coat of paint, and then repeated revisions. As a result, it gets thicker. You can’t see the undercoat because it’s in the back. What you see now is a newly painted area. What is painted underneath is the past, and the present is based on the accumulation of the past. Although the work has been submitted as a finished product, it is not a finished product, and revisions can be made on top of it in the ongoing process.

I think it is the same with life. I want to express in my paintings what I feel are the endings and beginnings, or the things that are always being redone. When I look back on my life, it was a life of constantly starting over and correcting things. If there is no possibility to correct and recover again, I can’t do it. Perhaps I am encouraging myself by painting these pictures, and I hope that the people who see them will be able to sense this. It is not the end yet, and there are still possibilities.