Concept
Landscape painting is "to paint the earth" Wataru Ishigaki (painter)
Your paintings have no "poison" in them" were the words of a gallery owner to me.
When I was a university student, I had a sudden impulse to bring my paintings to an art gallery. If I did well, the gallery might even let me keep my paintings. My hopes were soon dashed. Look at the works here. They all have a certain "poison" in them, don't they? Some of the painters have been hospitalized for mental illness. There were heavy, dark, thickly painted oil paintings with a unique energy. Poison attracts people." I once heard such a phrase in a TV drama I saw.
I was 20 years old when I decided I wanted to become a painter. At the time, I was a junior in the economics department of Sapporo University. While my friends were beginning their job hunting activities, I started selling my paintings on the streets of arcades at night. I felt that I had to do something, and I wanted to have someone look at my paintings and hear what they thought of them. At the time, there were two to three dozen "street artists," and while many of them were illustrations or characters for T-shirts or stickers, I put my landscapes on display, despite people ridiculing me saying, "Landscape paintings don't sell. For some reason, I have been attracted to landscapes since I was a child.
After graduating from university, I started working at a plate-making company. After two years of studying printing, I left the company and started my own business as a freelance illustrator at the age of 24. With no contacts or connections, I started working for design companies and publishing houses with a phone book (is that a dead word?) in hand. With no contacts, I contacted design and publishing companies with a phone book (a dead word?) in hand, had them take a look at my drawings, and made sales. At first, I worked part-time at a tavern from late at night to early in the morning, painting when I could and sleeping when I could. By chance, the watercolor painting class I started got off the ground, and I started getting illustration jobs.
Just before I turned 30, I suddenly found myself in a slump. I could draw the illustrations I was asked to do, but when it came to original work, I felt nauseous and could not draw for more than 10 minutes. As I found out later, I was afraid to change my style because I had made up my own restrictions about what I thought was my own style of drawing. I really wanted to do something new, but my mind was rejecting what I had unknowingly stopped myself from doing. Why am I painting landscapes at this time? I asked myself for the first time what I was painting. I closed my eyes in front of the white watercolor paper, which I could not paint, and remembered the time when I went out to cover the winter sunrise.
I stood alone in the snowfield, where no one was around and all I could hear was the sound of the wind. The blue sky gradually turned reddish, and the weak sun became visible. As the sun began to shine and move, I realized that the earth was moving (spinning). In my daily life, I was not aware that the planet Earth is where we live and spend our time. I realized that when I paint a landscape, I am painting the earth, and now I thought about what the earth is and what it is made of. What is it made of? Earth? Element? No, no. That's not what I meant. As I was thinking about it, the kanji character for "love" appeared vaguely behind my closed eyelids. Earth" = "love," which I genuinely thought was wonderful. The word "love" here does not mean just liking or disliking something, but rather, it is an image of "an existence that envelops you with something far greater and warmer. This was the moment when I realized that I wanted to depict that kind of love while painting landscapes. I realized that as long as I did not deviate from this theme, I could say that my paintings were my own, even if my style changed. It was also the beginning of my career as a painter.
A year later, I was standing on the deck of a ship circumnavigating the globe. I wanted to experience first hand the size of the Earth that I would be facing. The slow speed of the ship also suited my purpose. I traveled to 18 countries in about three months. This was my first trip abroad.
If I could paint a picture with love, it might be no less than a picture with poison. It has been 11 years since I traveled around the globe with this thought in mind. I am now 43 years old. I am still creating more and more, searching for my own unique form of love. (Notes on the year 2022)
