This text serves as the documentation of how I encountered deer blood, the fifth material I started using—after masking tape, local soil, flour, and white road marking paint—following my participation in Reborn-Art Festival. I will here publish text, photographic documentation, and photographs and videos of my works.
When it comes to continuing to paint pictures, the question of “What do I paint?” is actually more relevant than the question of “What I paint?”—especially today, when we are inundated with things. What comes next is the inquiry “Where do I paint?” and only then does the question “What do I paint?” arise.
What should I paint with? If you go to an art supply store, you find a surprising number of paints neatly lined up, each one equally insisting: “Please! Please paint with me!” Anyone aspiring to become a painter will have experienced how paints with the same name actually have different colors due to differences in terms of acrylic, oil, and watercolor, or manufacturer, while painting oils and mediums also need to be taken into consideration, all of which makes my head spin when it comes to choosing the best combination. If paint contains precious pigment, even a tube of paint as small as the size of your palm doesn’t come cheap, and especially for someone like me who paints quite fast, it is rather expensive. But there is not much I can do but look around and imitate how other people make their choices, or gather up squadrons of color based on recommendations from sellers with a feeling akin to drawing lots. The more I think about whether or not the combination is correct, the harder it is to get rid of the slight apprehension I have.
On the other hand, I think that any kind of paint will do, because when I used as a child to draw a picture on the back of an advertising flyer with the crayons or colored pencils that were already prepared, I never thought, “I can’t draw a picture without that color made by that manufacturer,” and rather, the Bolognese sauce left on a plate after eating, the soy sauce on cold tofu, or the ketchup from a rice omelet all appeared perfect painting materials to me. (Indeed, I was scolded for “painting” with these materials and chopsticks on paper and plates.) As such, what mattered to me was being able to select painting materials and a location that matched my urgent desire to paint right here and now, and I started to gradually notice that I considered whatever responds to this desire as painting materials, not necessarily limited to what’s sold at an art supply store, so at an izakaya restaurant, I would paint pictures with soy sauce and Worcester sauce on the back of chopstick bags whenever I had the chance. I wasn’t deliberately trying to do something strange, but rather as I walked around looking for the most appropriate material in an environment, the soil around me, masking tape, and white road marking paint all became my strong allies, and that feeling turned into a conviction in the course of working as an artist. And now, reuniting with the places where I previously made work and the materials I used, the world appears slightly closer than before.
Anyway, after this long introduction, the main theme starts from here: One month after Reborn-Art Festival 2019 ended, I dared to call up the hunter Onodera and asked, “Could I join your next hunting trip and get the deer blood?” Though the fall of 2019 was a difficult time because a large typhoon had hit the Oshika Peninsula, Onodera kindly agreed, and that’s how I came to encounter this forbidden material that is blood, which I had pretended not to see for a long time.
