STANDING PINE

For the solo exhibition ‘Red paintings of Tomoaki Shitara’

Tomoaki Shitara
 
 I brought ‘a visual dictionary of cicadas’ with me to a hospital.
I read it with my wife in a waiting room and then she got feeling sick.
I had a delusion that she was hooked up to a drip on a stretcher,
however, it did not happened in reality and she got feeling better soon.
 
 When I was a boy, I went out everyday to catch cicadas in summer.
I caught lots of them with a bamboo pole with birdlime on its top.
There were many large brown cicadas and sometimes black cicadas too.
And then, I buried dead cicadas into a hole in the ground.
The location of the holes was all different,
so they were not called as their tombs.
 
 Although my eye sight is not particularly good,
I probably have been good at finding cicadas in the woods.
In that way, I found some interesting works among lots of paintings.
They were found from old paintings to the situation in today’s world.
 
 Red is the color of the soil in the ground and also of the body.
The color of red can be lightly soaked in and solidify.
Iron oxide is the iron which is a material that huge stars of
the universe reach at last. It is also circulating in blood.
 
 I had a delusion of being hooked in a drip on a stretcher and
filled with the permanent chemical.

《インク壜のなかの小さな人》
2017 油彩、顔料インク、真鍮、壜 H=7.7cm


《針金と紙でつくった大きな瞼》 2016 油彩、針金、楮紙 21.5cm×77.5cm