The work started out by drawing a French-style cartoon. However, it was difficult to develop it in any way, so I decided to turn the cartoon into a single picture. In the meantime, I struggled for about two years. When I was still not satisfied, I happened to see an exhibition by Kinzo, an ukiyoe artist from Tosa, my hometown. It was a world like Kabuki, where a turret is assembled and the work is presented three-dimensionally like a stage. Then, my wife happened to see a magazine feature on Ukiyo-e, which inspired me to create a work that shows the work in three dimensions, like a stage. In the end, I returned to a flat surface with a sense of tension, leaving the stage element as the curtain. The motif of the work was originally based on Godard's "Crazy Clown," so the theme was love between a man and a woman. The title "Hanazakari no Mori" is a reference to the title of Yukio Mishima's novel "Hanazakari no Mori. Mishima's novels also have many motifs of love and hate between men and women, so I thought it was appropriate. The technique is acrylic paint on watercolor paper. Some color inks are also used. The texture of the watercolor paper was chosen to be as rough as possible. This is because I wanted to emphasize the raw texture.
