It was during my artist residency at Tsunagi Town, Kumamoto in 2016, that I came up with the phrase “Life becoming Paintings.”

It spontaneously aroused from my solid sense that my own way of living (or life) is the very thing that connects to discovery of paintings.

From that moment on, life becoming paintings carries on no matter where I go.

For a while after giving birth to my son in 2019, I cried every night to a feeling I have never felt before. I could hardly describe this feeling through words, but still, I felt the urge to remember this as it seemed to be something easily forgotten.

Maybe I could remember it through imagery – I decided to retain the vague feeling through painting rather than words. As I nervously drew an image, trying to be true to my feelings as much as possible, it came out to be a painting that used colors almost monochrome with a white light source illuminating inside it, which seemed like a view from a dark window inside a spaceship. I had no idea what the light was, but anyway, I became sad to realize that I was already detached from it and could not return to that light I saw from the window anymore. Although I was not confident if I depicted it right, that image lingered inside my head since then.

Time flew, and now I live in a life becoming paintings with my son.

As I started farming after childbirth, I was impressed by how everything on earth connects and influence each other, and how my son grew like a seed with programmed speed and ways/manners without educating, being introduced to a new perspective on life.

As I appreciate the change of my heart and body along to the seasons that come and go, I am gaining courage from the fleeting present and the presentiment toward next encompassed within it.

Through this repetitive process, some things I could not help but to reach out and capture, to keep and share to others, became paintings.

The house window I see every day.

The farming field I go with my son.

The strange feeling when I woke up from a nap at my mother’s house to see my son asleep beside me.

The various sparkles of interaction that occurred just when people happened to be present at my live painting at LOKO GALLERY.

Apart from these paintings drawn from my recent life, there is one painting that I have been working on even before my son’s birth – though I have stopped working on this many times, I continued to pursue a certain image despite the complete change of the composition and motif.

Initially it was a drawing of an evening light at the city, then it transformed into a light of the farm field at dusk.

And indeed, it was that light. I found the light – something I thought was distant and could not touch anymore – at the farm field. As I realized this during the drawing process, I discovered that the light was always present in each painting brought from my life. It is the reflection of that light in the form of a landscape. A message left behind the colors.  And now, even in the presence of my son who is closest to me, I can feel the warmth of that light.

Chie KODA

ARTIST PROFILE: Chie Koda