Blog

Each spring, the cherry blossoms return in full glory - soft, luminous, and impossibly brief.
In an old district in Kyoto I call home, canals once carried boats through a sake-brewing neighborhood.  In spring, those same canals become something almost dreamlike, as blossoms gather above the water and drift slowly with the current.

When I began this painting, I didn’t want to describe the blossoms in a literal way.  Cherry blossoms are not something you can fully capture with precision - they are constantly changing, falling, dissolving into light and air.

So I painted them without a fixed plan.  Instead of defining each petal, I let the brush move more freely, allowing the shapes to emerge and disappear.

It was a joyful way to paint, though at times I wondered where it was going.  Still, I kept moving forward, until something began to quietly take shape.

I wasn’t trying to paint how they look, but how they feel - soft, fleeting, and slightly beyond reach.

There is a kind of beauty in that impermanence.  In Japan, it is often felt as Mono no aware - a gentle awareness that nothing lasts, and that this is precisely what makes a moment so precious.

This sensibility runs quietly through much of classical Japanese literature.  In The Tale of Genji, written by Murasaki Shikibu, moments of beauty are often inseparable from their passing.  A scene is moving not because it endures, but because it cannot.

Cherry blossoms have long carried this feeling.  They arrive in fullness, and just as quickly, begin to fall - reminding us not to hold too tightly, but to notice, and to feel.

Perhaps that is why cherry blossoms draw us back, year after year.  Not just to see them, but to feel that passing moment again.