Piece of reality

The world as an indeterminable, uncertain reality. Take a group of people in a forest, in a public place or in the park; children playing with each other; a girl on a footbridge; a deserted, desolatelandscape. When I put them into a painting, I merely hint at time, place, action - thus allowing viewers to look more closely and seek their own personal level of reality. Free from subjective concerns and stripped of colour. In my paintings, emotions, ordinary contradictions and human frailties are transformed into gentle, quiet, soft, resonances. The human condition I depict comes from mypersonal observations rather than what is fed to us by the media.

Resonance

The resonances appear as a blur which abstract themselves from time and can even span past and future within itself : an extended moment, a present lost in reverie. The source of the resonance is unclear to allow a dreamlike, displaced reality. A sound - quiet but present. What is seen becomes blurred again, rendering the images peculiarly indefinite.

Reducing

I came to the conclusion that colour imparts a powerfully shifting impact on a painting – it can radically change the effect and meaning – and this disturbed me. When we see people, we automatically start to interpret. If I depict people in colour, it is immediately much more of a statement and quickly creates the impression of being overloaded. That is why I have been stripping colour further and further back, or rather, fading it out.

Subtle combined differences

Small canvases are more open whilst portraying blurring, intimations, faintness. With big paintings, it is different. Large surfaces require a self-contained world be depicted. It is a challenge to bring drawing and painting together – to get the balance right between the two techniques. During this unending process of working with reduction, nothing is to be focused and no moment robbed of its continuity. So, looking again and again, you will find – or think you find - images you might not have seen at first glance. I invite my viewers not to trust their eyes too quickly.  Take time to see clearly; give space to each look at a painting for a second or third reading of a scene. Behind frivolity lies earnestness, behind lightness there is seriousness. Nothing is static, stable, nothing stays as it seems to be.

Parallelity

What I show in different formats in painting is always a part of the many levels of reality. These levels need each other; idyll and danger, good and evil - their existence is intertwined. Something is amiss if one side is too strong or if one interpretation predominates. So my aim is to captur parallelity of life through in-betweens. 

Miwa Ogasawara