Are there times when you aren’t sure what to paint?That’s how it always is. It’s really difficult every time. Once I start a painting, I get depressed every day for the first one or two weeks. I can’t come up with anything at all and fall into this dark space where I doubt my talent and throw my brushes around saying stuff like “Nothing I do is gonna be any good,” or “What do I do?” But it’s like Takashi Nemoto said: “I still have to do it.” And that’s exactly how it is—each day I work and get all gloomy like “I’m no good,” but then I tell myself that I still have to do it, and after enough that cycle I end up with something.
After experiencing this cycle so many times, do you now have confidence that you’ll always “end up with something eventually”?No, if I start to paint thinking, “Whatever, I’ll end up with something anyway,” it pretty much always ends in disaster. I have to be like “I hate this,” “God damn it,” but keep pushing on, keep painting and failing, over and over again until I finally at long last produce something that’s just kinda okay. Then I set it aside for a bit. I’ll start on the next painting in the meantime, doing that cycle of trial and error again for a while until bam, suddenly I’ve got something perfect.
What exactly do you mean by that?Even after all this time, I don’t really know. But for some reason artwork I think went well comes out fast. Lots of musicians say the same thing, so it’s really weird. But there’s something addictive about it that keeps me coming back for more. Unfortunately, things only go that way very rarely, like maybe one painting per exhibition.
Maybe it’s a mental state you can only reach precisely because you have those times of anguish.You’re probably right. That’s precisely why, when I feel something does go well, I’m jumping with joy all by myself, like, “Alright, everything is okay now!” If I can put out one painting I like, then I can be at ease and churn out the rest one after the other.
Until I get to that place, I’m full of wicked thoughts like: “I’m going to shock everyone,” or “I’ll make something that sells,” or “I’ll shut the critics up.” But after repeated failures, I go into the painting, like “Why isn’t this working?” until all I can think about is painting. I can’t hear music, and I lose all track of time. Once all those bad thoughts disappear from my mind, there’ll come a moment when suddenly it hits me like BOOM, and I start to think maybe there really is a God. Everything up to that point is just really, really brutal. That’s why the ideal setup for me is actually to choose from pieces I’ve accumulated over time like I did with that first New York show.
So your process for the production period leading up to each exhibition is that strenuous?It is. And I do it because the show is decided beforehand and I now have a deadline. If I didn’t have a deadline, I may very well call it quits partway through. The worst was when I had three or so solo shows lined up in a year and spent pretty much the entire year stuck in that cycle.
When I was young I could paint late into the night, but once I hit 40, I started keeping earlier hours and would come to this studio at 8:30 in the morning and could only keep going until 7 or so at the longest. My focus just can’t hold out. That’s why I’ve recently made it known that I only want to do solo shows once a year.
Is it that harsh even when doing only a single piece for a group exhibition or art fair, not just solo shows?It is, yeah. People have sharp eyes, and if I slack off they’re going to notice. So I’m more serious about those situations than you’d think, since I know I have to put my heart into it.
That said, group shows and art fairs are way easier than solo shows, so that mental aspect does have some effect. Having less pressure oftentimes helps me produce good work. I’m pretty fond of the artwork I made for the group show we did at the Taka Ishii Gallery Kyobashi at the end of last year. While I did fall into that “This sucks, this sucks, what do I do” state while making it, I was able to finish it in just four hours once I immersed myself in the work. It’s a simple piece, subdued to the point that the color of the wall stands out more and I was thinking maybe I overdid it washing out the tones, but it turned out to be fine once it was on display in the gallery. The exhibition space lets in natural light, so the brightness of the colors appears to change depending on the time of day, which I found interesting. It doesn’t stand out at all, so I find it to be a piece that really hits home for me.