Profile of the artist (日英併記)

 He was born in Fukushima city in 1961. He spent his boyhood in the rice fields and village forest with every kinds of creatures. Folk craft in Tohoku region attracted him, and the collection and repair of those craft was the part of his life then. In his junior high school days, he came across Shiko Munakata, who is a famous block-print artist also from Tohoku region. Munakata’s works provided the impression that it’s the part of nature like birds or insects. He was absorbed in watching birds in high school days. In that time he witnessed the works by C.F. Tunnicliffe who is the artist from UK, and get wise to the leads based on the tradition on his home country. That brought him to the Japanese traditional arts.

In 1986, his experimental work “Bean Goose” that was mixture of western and eastern type of art won a prize at Birds in Art Exhibition in US. The work is lined up as one of the collection at Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin.

He created works of art in various nature-rich areas, including Kaga city in Ishikawa, Bekkai-cho in Hokkaido, and Yonezawa city in Yamagata. His style is based on the Yamato-e-style sumi ink painting created by Sotatsu Tawaraya at the beginning of the Edo Period. In 2000, he won a prize at Kacho-ga Exhibition at Shohaku Museum in Nara. He started to develop his works with warmth of Japanese paper rather than works protected by glass or acrylic materials.

He has had a studio in Ada, Kunigami-son in Okinawa since 2006, where he continues to produce painted art pieces. Okinawa tends to be thought as vivid colored world, however, he found Yanbaru forests in northern area the world of Sumi-e, matted and dark, covered by fog. His current style is based on Yamato-e-style, also on sketches of nature he makes outdoors.