West
Spotlight Artist
Yasuyo Maruyama
West
Artist Statement
The inspiration for my artwork reflects my interactions with people, of which I remember certain scenes, atmospheres, colors, and gestures. When I was a teenager, I suffered from severe atopic dermatitis and experienced recovery from skin keloid. Since then, I have become very curious about human faces, especially eyes.
As the proverb says, “Speech is silver; silence is golden.” Our eyes can express a great deal of insight about ourselves. Depicting the eyes is, in a sense, the same as depicting myself in the mirror. I try to embody an image of myself in each portrait that I paint. I create paintings that are often a reflection of my own issues and thoughts, which are then combined with the model’s personality and their stories. While I find similarities and differences in gender and race as delightful encounters, in my mind I create an “individual” or “new character” in my paintings that does not exist in real life.
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