Sayo Watano

 

My works are type of representational art which are a mix of comic art, illustration and poster art. Fundamentally, my works have two combined motifs in each, place and living thing that appears there. Placeis, for example, forest, sea, stairs, desert and it could be anywhere imaginable. Living thingscan be humans, animals, and literally any creatures in earth. At first I decide one of the two motifs that I wanted to draw most, and then, I add the other one to fit it. This is my technique to create art. The work that is born is inevitably like a scene in a story. When I compose works, I follow two rules. The first is to draw a picture that gives the observer positive emotions. The second is to draw a peaceful world where all the creatures are in harmony. I became interested in animal welfare because I grew up in an environment with many animals around, and studied biology at university. The most interesting theme during my studies was how animals and people live in harmony and coexist in society. Since I started learning painting, I have drawn many paintings where animals and humans are interacting with each other in a positive way. In other words, I have been drawing things that show the ideal world in my eyes. However, I draw indirectly about the harmony between living things and human, so few people feel a strong message from my paintings. That is because, in case of direct expression, the creative method is fixed, and both the scope of my imagination and the scope of the observer’s imagination are narrow. I draw a picture that looks like a scene in a story, but I haven’t made the details of the story myself, and I want to entrust it to observer to think about what is happening in that scene. I would be happy if observers enjoyed being given this spark to think about things in their own way based on my scene.

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