Every new year I learn how to paint again. This year I used thick, rough washi and investigated some of little alleys, the roji in Yanaka.
Everything is interesting if you take time to look at it.
What a privilege to be able to look. if you don’t draw I recommend it as a form of meditation that broadens your life.
Yuito’s Alley, 2022
February is when October is built. October is the exhibition. For that I paint in February. If I'm lucky things start to come together about now. Often they fall apart and are built again.
Ideally the summer is for putting it together, making scrolls, frames, invitation cards and the like.
My ballpoint pen has been my friend this lunar new year
I found this fine thin washi paper under some bond in my desk. Did I buy it? Was it given to me? Was it a free sample?
Hard to say. But it is distinctive and just what I wanted to start a new year of painting.
Every year I paint for my exhibition that happens in October.
By having the exhibition I interrupt my painting. Between the exhibition and the demands of the university I am away from actual painting long enough to forget how to paint, which is a good thing.
I can start to learn again. I’m hoping this new old washi will help me with this year’s discoveries.
New painting in progress, next some comes some shading, perhaps even colors
Ten yen Fuji, etching
On New Year’s Morning I ride my bike over to Fuji-mi-zaka, Fuji view slope, the last place here that Fuji was still visible from the ground. Fuji has been gone for years. I still make the ride, not in hopes that the buildings that have risen to block the view will have fallen, but out of muscle memory.
I notice that some of the older folks still stop and bow toward Fuji as they pass the top of the slope.
Old habits die hard.
Time to th8nk about a new years card.
After the exhibition I have done a little painting and made a new frame
