How to paint memories
Essay Series: Introductions 6/8
After coming back from the States in the beginning of March, the whole world got hit with a massive wake up call. While I’m thankful to have a career where staying at home is required and necessary, we are all learning to adjust to this new norm. Alongside working on some new projects, I’m driving my new motorbike around trying to avoid the cramped, bacteria-filled train cars as much as possible.
This evening, I am reflecting on my two months traveling and can’t help but smile at all of the crazy experiences life threw in my path. While walking around Brooklyn, I decided to carry a piece of canvas everywhere as I moved through the city. If I stopped at coffee shops, I would jot down some words from a conversation I was eavesdropping on. If I was people-watching, I would add dashes of color from the scenes that played out in front of me.
I wanted to take pieces of the city back with me to Japan to start the series “Blending Stories”, a collaboration I was to have with a coffee shop here in Osaka and Brooklyn.
Even though I didn’t know how to exactly go about this project or how it would turn out, I don’t think I’ve ever had more fun completing a series. After gathering different memorabilia from New York, I came back home to my tatami room studio and retraced my steps of the entire trip. I spent a couple of weeks organizing all the different things and piecing the seemingly disconnected memories together to make sense out of experiences that weren’t related.
Now back and safe at home, all of these moments have become even more precious to me. Being able to preserve it in this way has given me an even greater appreciation for all of the small moments and thoughts that seem to disappear and before you know it, are forgotten.
These pieces will also be sold for the #artistsupportpledge, where after 5 pieces find their homes, I will be continue the chain and purchase from another artist that is having difficulty during this time using the same hashtag. The stories are all listed on the good ol’ gram along with the details of each, so please check them out and tell me which one vibes with you the most. I’m at home all the time now sitting in my studio so would love to hear what you think. And with that being said, I should also do my best to exercise and not come out of this experience looking like a fluffy teddy bear.
Hope you all are healthy and thriving amongst the chaos.
“Do You Like Comedy?” Brooklyn, 2020.
Click the painting for the rest in the series.
Otsukare and stay safe in these crazy crazy times.
““For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it,
and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.””