About

I'm a Japanese national living abroad. I studied law — no background in art, aside from the drawing every child does in elementary school.

As an adult, I started drawing and painting with my kids, using crayons and acrylics. Around that time, I happened to become friends with a professional painter, and we started painting in oils together.

I'm not claiming the result was skillfully done — that's not the point. What I think is worth recording is narrower than that: I had never heard the word "sfumato," had no art training, and had no idea that painters spend years learning to render soft, edgeless transitions of light and shadow instead of hard outlines. I wasn't imitating a technique I didn't know existed. I simply painted the scene the way it looked to me, and it came out that way — because that's how I see.

I still can't prove this. For now, the paintings are the closest thing I have to a record, so I'll keep posting them here. It also looks hereditary, though I can't prove that either.

My father, my uncle, my sister, and my children all seem to share it. My mother is the only exception in my family — everyone else appears to lack illusions and see edges the same soft, sfumato way I do.