Vegetables and Flowers Painting project

The vegetables and flowers I adopt as the motifs for my works are mostly selected for their forms and colors. The research that I conduct in and out of Japan covers a wide range of areas, such as streets, fields, parks, mountains, and rivers, as well as familiar places such as supermarkets.

About Vegetables

From around 2009, I began to visit several farms a couple of time a year with a chef friend. At those farms, vegetables were grown in a near-natural condition, such as through the use of heirloom seeds. I brought home the vegetables that I harvested, and began my artistic production process by eating them. This allowed me to feel the positive energy of vegetables during the time I depicted my work.

About Flowers

When I was small, my mother would hold my hand and take me for walks. I vaguely remember her showing me flowers that were planted along roadsides and in gardens, and saying, “This is what beautiful means.”

In 2003, I visited churches and art museums in Europe to view paintings that would likely never be exhibited in Japan. On that occasion, I sketched and photographed flowers that bloomed in various places. At that time, I found out that Europeans see the value of a flower in a completely different way. That is, I was able to come to feel that a flower is the symbol of a positive energy toward life. Thus, the images of a flower I have today are “beautiful” and also possess “a positive energy” toward life.

In addition, in the same way that the first person who recorded African-American blues was an anthropologist, one of the roles of a painter might be to derive new artistic forms from existing flowers and vegetables.