Walking in Minoh no Mori Project, "Minoh no Mori Artwalk 2015"

I paint extremely abstracted ‘landscape painting', focusing only on the single point of ‘extracting colour from the landscape’. This is a work that raises questions about the way we view landscapes in today's IT-enabled society, and aims to provide an opportunity to realise the essence of ‘landscapes’, which can now be easily recorded and viewed by anyone, while moving between the boundaries of real and abstract, analogue and digital. Photos of everyday life and landscapes are processed into mosaics, only colour information is extracted, and the dots with it are faithfully drawn with paint. But it’s supported without doubt by the analogue act of walking, the information processed digitally, and the colours reproduced by her hands. So how does the landscape painting convey the meaning of itself, which is broken down into “mix,” “paint,” and “depict,”, and how would viewers see them? She believes that the abstracted and sophisticated “paintings” can tell something more than “information” to the viewers by taking time to read and understand it. It is an information that includes minor phenomena such as the materiality of canvas, touch of paints, and the physicality of the artist. Moreover, it can be the viewer’s imagination that is embossed in front of a pared-down painting. Real and abstract, analogue and digital, physical and virtual. Crossing those boundaries, she also seems to quietly examine variations on our post-pandemic way of “walking” the world. While imagining the scenery the artist saw, I hope that the work will serve as a trigger to remind viewers of the meaning of the painting, their sense of beauty, and their own unique world.