“I don’t want to limit my work to depicting children,” Watanabe says, “but, in my mind, I see children starting to move in the painting. If I can enter this space and transform it, the work changes from an object meant to be admired to a functional space like a tool. Just by letting my daughters enter a painting space created by someone else, the space does not change but still changes for some elusive reason that is difficult to express in words. Are the daughters the only ones open?” Doors in the space? This gives me joy. “
Watanabe also seemed to be filled with great joy when he talked about the Western art works he copied. He was particularly fascinated by the ancient masters’ pursuit of capturing variations of light and darkness. One of the big differences he found between Japanese and Western art traditions was the use of outline.
“The Japanese have been using brushes since ancient times,” he said. “They used them to capture the outlines of objects and people. It eventually became the expression of ukiyo-e, a technique of placing flat colors within outlines.”
My idea was to pursue a pure painting, removing any noise from the original painting. “
While his ability to copy the works of the old masters improved with practice, it also improved after he began to record and accept this essential difference. Silhouettes and flattened colors once became a trap that prevented him from fully capturing the style of the European artists he wanted to imitate.
Of all the paintings he copied, the one he found most inspiring was Peter Paul Rubens’ “Descent from the Cross.” He placed a vibrant diagonal scene in a forest by Henri Rousseau. The presence of Rubens’s work embodies the original aspects of Rousseau’s landscape. The wild and unknowable becomes generative and produces something that the audience can relate to.
“Realism reminds me of gray ground motion theory and empty Newtonian space. When I think of Michelangelo, I think of cartoonishly over-the-top bodies. Everything in Botticelli is a stage set. ‘Descent of the Cross’ was a studio production and, actually, not a very good piece. But I was happy when I finished it because I thought I got something a little closer to a Rubens painting. I want to try it again, only bigger,” Watanabe said.
Another common thread in Watanabe’s recent paintings is their always large size. Each piece takes two to three months of detail from start to finish. (Watanabe jokes that since he started using reading glasses, details require a little more attention than before.)
Preparation begins with figuring out how to zoom in or out of the original work he will cite. A series of sketches helped him through the process. Projectors are not suitable for work because the lenses distort the original image. Once the sketch has the result he wants, Watanabe applies a thin layer of plaster with calcium carbonate to the canvas. The acrylic base is painted three times, then the scene and characters are roughly sketched out, and the rough details are painted in oils, using a fan to remove the eye of the brush. Next add the details, tracing first, then in oil.
However, a large part of the months it took to make these paintings was spent preparing sketches. “Once it goes beyond sketching, it’s difficult to change the image,” Watanabe said. Although sketches are crucial to his creative process, the artist discards them once their purpose is completed.
“Realism reminds me of gray theories of ground motion and empty Newtonian space. When I think of Michelangelo, I think of cartoonishly over-the-top bodies.”
Watanabe spent his youth surrounded by art books and visiting museums. His mother, an amateur painter and art school graduate, acted as his guide on these trips. However, art was not the main interest at the time. That changed when he created an oil painting that was highly praised by his artistic mother.
Local middle and high schools offer few arts-related extracurricular activities. The available art classes were “pointless,” while music classes were more of a “painful memory” than a creative outlet.
“I’m self-taught,” he said. “I didn’t have an art teacher in high school, and I didn’t study art in college. I learned from technical books that my mother carried with her, but the lessons in them were still quite limited.”
Despite this, the call to paint still sounded from deep within. The marriage brought children, and Watanabe knew he needed to make money somehow. He gambled on his art and planned a solo exhibition in Tokyo. Around the same time, he wrote a play that was staged by friends at a local theater. The first solo exhibition and sales of the play provided funds for another exhibition in Ginza.
Around that time, Tokyo’s economy was booming, and Watanabe’s meager income from art began to dry up. However, things turned around when he won 10 million yen (approximately $90,000) in a high-stakes art competition. The victory attracted the attention of art fairs and Christie’s Hong Kong. *
This article originally appeared in High Fructose Issue 54, which is now sold out. Get our latest issue with your new subscription here!
