the eternal trio 8 (the vanishment 4)

A landscape that makes time visible—a question posed toward what it means to exist.
This work dates from the final phase of a period in which Fujimoto's landscapes were moving from figuration toward abstraction. Through layering and grinding, the surface is held between representation and abstraction—capturing, as a painting, the very process by which a landscape transforms.

At the center of the painting, two rocks and one rounded mass—this "trio"—remain rooted in the earth, unmoving and unshaken. Everything around them, by contrast, seems to lose its edges and dissolve, shaped by a process of repeated layering and grinding. Between what stays still and what keeps changing, I wanted to give form to the very texture of time itself.

The title isn't rooted in nostalgia. It comes from something closer to a revelation—standing in a hamlet on Ishigaki Island, I was struck, almost physically, by the question of what it means to exist, before I had any way to think it through. Pairing the opposing words "eternal" and "vanishing" was my attempt to hold onto that initial, unfiltered impulse.

As with Fujimoto's other works, this piece is made using his technique of layering and grinding acrylic paint. This process produces the distinctive color and matière characteristic of his work.

The process begins with a full-scale line drawing made on tracing paper, separate from the panel itself. He then plans the composition of color layers to be built up—choosing colors based on what feels right pictorially, rather than staying strictly faithful to each motif's local color. Once both the linework and the color plan are largely settled, the drawing is transferred from the tracing paper onto the panel, and the actual painting begins.

The panel is mounted on both sides (a cradled, double-faced construction). A ground coat is applied across the entire surface—front, sides, and back—with the same color as the picture's background carried over onto the sides as well.

On the surface, after an initial ground coat and preparatory sanding to smooth out the wood grain, more than twenty layers of paint are built up across both broad areas and details. The surface is then sanded down with waterproof sandpaper under running water. This cycle of sanding and checking the surface is repeated until the image feels complete.

2 months

Installation view from "Close-up View, Distant View vol.2," Gallery ATOS (Okinawa), 2016.

This piece is the center work of the three shown here.

All three works are based on research trips to the Yaeyama Islands, Okinawa.

The blue seascape on the right, incidentally, is already available on ArtSticker:

"Return 3": https://artsticker.app/works/40721