SHUKADO gallery

“Bijinga Renaissance”, opening Wednesday 1 April at Hankyu Umeda, includes an installation corner showing the materials the eight contemporary artists use and the things that give them ideas.

Palette for figures / scales for pigment / notes on mixing / mineral pigments, animal glue, earth pigments. The tools are modular, so that they can be arranged on the palette in different ways.

I love Vietnam and have been about four times, collecting the dress of its minority peoples a little at a time. Designs and handwork that carry a particular meaning set my heart going just to look at. The kimono is of course Japan’s own dress, but in the dress of other countries too one sees the soul and culture of a people.

Working closely with the creative team at Shiseido’s Clé de Peau Beauté, comparing views as we went, was a stimulating and valuable experience for someone who normally paints entirely by her own judgement.

I often use a pearl necklace as a motif. As a child I found one in my mother’s dressing-table drawer and quietly put it round my own neck. Opening the drawer I was not meant to open, imagining myself grown up — I think that trained my imagination.

I always use brushes from Maruyama Yūshindō in Osaka. The small and large tsuketate brushes in particular have served me well; even when the tip of the large one wears down it is still good for fine gradation and for colouring rounded patterns. They have body, they are firm at the base, they do not splay, and they hold their point.

What surrounds me follows my own taste. That may sound obvious, but it is the strictest rule and one never to be broken. If a thing comes to speak for me, nothing more need be said; hoping for exactly that, I am always open to an encounter, even without looking.

A bamboo grove is a place of refuge for a tiger. Shōjuin, where the sliding-door paintings are installed, is likewise far from the noise of the city, in the middle of nature. In that one can be quiet and face oneself there, it may be a place of refuge for those who visit. The work shows a tiger walking slowly through a moonlit bamboo grove, resting for a while and finding stillness of body and mind.

Exhibition: “Bijinga Renaissance”, from Wednesday 1 April 2020, Hankyu Umeda