Tomoko Kashiki: Whether it is a woman

September 03, 2023 - October 21, 2023 | Ota Fine Arts 7CHOME
  • I am drawing a woman. There was always a bit of hesitation to affirm this, but viewers often perceive it...
    Come With Me, 2019, Acrylic, linen, wooden panel, 154 x 110 cm

    I am drawing a woman. There was always a bit of hesitation to affirm this, but viewers often perceive it as a woman, so I did not deny it particularly. Although I have never drawn their faces and bodies thinking “this is a woman” or “let’s draw it like a woman”, almost all of their clothes were skirts. This is because I did not feel like drawing trousers. It is not that I want to specifically draw a skirt, but I also do not want to draw them nude. In other words, the skirts (clothes) were positioned as ‘a cloth to wrap up the breasts and crotch’. (In terms of what kind of skirt, I wanted to draw, there is no specific skirt. Each clothes provide a meaning or an impression to the viewer with its color, shape, and pattern. Even a white dress or a black/white costume evokes something. Nonetheless, what I wanted to achieve was ‘meaningless clothes’, hence, after consideration, it became something like uniforms. This is because a uniform is something you are to forced wear. There is no independent will in it. I tried to draw trousers to show that there is no obsession with skirts, but I just could not feel like I wanted to draw them. If I draw something I do not want to draw, the lines will appear lifeless. However, recently, I often draw trousers. I do not draw them for any particular reason, but that I am now able to draw them. For some reason, the trousers might have transformed into a motif that is fitting for me to draw. Or it may be related to whether it is a self-portrait, interests and preferences, fluctuations in gender consciousness, etc., but I myself do not bother with what they are. I am only glad that I can draw both skirts and trousers.

  • I have heard that when you draw a person, everything becomes a self-portrait. Indeed, it is certainly something to think...
    Detail of Praying for Good Luck,  2017, acrylic, linen, wood panel, 45.2 x 25.7 cm

    I have heard that when you draw a person, everything becomes a self-portrait. Indeed, it is certainly something to think about. In particular, when drawing details (such as eyes, hands, and toes) to express the person's feelings, it feels as if I have become that person or as if I have entered into their mind. My consciousness concentrates on the same part as the part I am drawing, and it poses in the same pose as what I want to draw. The best way to draw a strained part is to make the same part strained in my body. It is not to sketch that very state, but it is important to me to experience that strained feeling. The location and the posture of the figures are in the place I want to be and in the pose I want to take. It might be an experience I went through that created a reason for drawing, or one that I go through in order to draw. Sometimes I think it might be better to call it a self-portrait. But I do not have pale and smooth skin or supple long limbs, and my appearance is nothing like the picture. There is a hesitation to call it a self-portrait, and my aesthetics do not allow it to look like me. Despite all this, I am starting to think that it should basically be a self-portrait. The person being drawn must not be too far from myself. When my self has changed, it is preferable for the drawn figure to change as well (I am not referring to the increase of wrinkles, becoming thinner, or putting on weight). This is to maintain an affinity between myself and the figure in my drawings. I think the distance between the two should not be too far apart, and in consequence there should be a continuous morphological change in some ways. I feel that it is important to be able to say that it is me, and it should not completely be an object.

  • Luminous Bones, 2022, Acrylic, pastel, photoluminescent powder, wood panel 181.8 x 227.3 cm
    Luminous Bones, 2022, Acrylic, pastel, photoluminescent powder, wood panel 181.8 x 227.3 cm

  • I started painting the figure's skin with a smooth white surface due to the influence from modern Bijin-ga paintings. The beauty of limbs on a white matte surface rimmed with a thin line of gray and pale red atop a natural ground color – these color sensations and textures that cause one to remember the tactility just by looking – I appreciated them and stared at them as closely as possible. That first visual experience remained vividly in my aesthetic sense. I like seeing what I think is a ‘beautiful person’ (existing in reality), but the figures that I paint do not exist in flesh and blood. The beauty of a person I depict starts from a pictorial beauty (an attempt to reproduce it), not from the result of trying to reproduce a real person. Fundamentally, it begins with "an adoration of that beautiful Bijin-ga painting", so I place the tone of the skin color relatively light, and then adjust it in relation to and within the range of the colors of the base, background and other motifs. In the case where I am conscious that it is a self-portrait, it brings a big change to the overall color tone of the painting. The fixed dark yellowish skin color is a limitation to the color composition. This dark yellowish skin color is close to the natural ground color and the wooden tone that I like to paint, so it becomes necessary to change the motif itself or match the ground color and background with this dark yellowish skin color. However, I would rather accept these changes than to have the figure in the painting be distant from my mental state. My painting changes through the conflict between the escape from adoration and imitation, and the faithfulness to my own aesthetics. Moreover, just as how I could suddenly draw trousers, I may be able to paint things that I previously did not want to. Perhaps, there may be a way to shorten the mental distance between the figure and myself by eliminating humanity in a more extreme direction.

    Unless I let go of the figure in the painting, I think the painting will change in response to myself. The tension between not renouncing the figure as "different from myself", trying to be a self-portrait, and being happy with what I have painted, are all important. I always want to be one with a painting and its part in that way.

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