"Receiving love is not taking. It is feeling, and acknowledging."
I painted it layering colors, hoping you might feel a healing that gently reaches the deep layers of the mind. Everyone holds both "darkness" and "light" within. True healing comes only when we acknowledge and integrate them instead of denying them. It is a painting made with the wish that you can take flight comfortably into the next stage of your life.
The Feeling in This Work
For those who are feeling healing in the depths of their mind and are about to take flight into a new stage of life.
Not only "giving love," but "receiving it" is also important. I put that realization into this work. May viewers touch the depths of their own minds and sense healing and light from deep within their hearts.
Concept & Background
A work born from the theme that by accepting both the "darkness" and the "light" hidden within, people can take flight into the next stage of life. Everyone carries shadows within. But I think true healing comes only when we acknowledge and integrate them instead of denying them.
Technique, Color & Expression
Layering acrylic paint many times, I scattered transparent colors based on blue and green across the expanse. By adding varied pointillist dots, I expressed a radiance like the stars of the universe or particles of the soul. I gave the canvas an abstract world in which light and darkness mix and yet move toward harmony.
On Making This Work
I made this work as a prayer to protect the hearts of those who view it and help them move toward the future. Having the courage not to deny the shadow within you but to face its existence. From there, true integration and freedom are born.
When you stand before this painting, may a faint light shine into the depths of your heart, and may it become a chance to remember the importance of both giving love and receiving it.
The same work cannot be delivered again, but with Personal Order Art, I paint a one-of-a-kind work just for you through a conversation with each person.About using the artwork
More about this painting
Mermaid legends and the dugong
Stories of mermaids are told all over the world, and one creature said to have inspired them is a marine mammal, the dugong.
Dugongs live in the warm seas from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, feeding on seagrass that grows on the sea floor. Swimming slowly and holding their young close as if to the chest, they may have looked human from a distance — which is said to have led to mermaid legends.
In Japan, the seas of Okinawa are the northern edge of the dugong's range, and it is designated a Natural Monument of Japan. Okinawa has many legends about dugongs.
For me, painting as "Mermaid nao," the dugong is a special creature.
The story of a continent called Lemuria
"Lemuria" in the title is the name of a phantom continent imagined in the 19th century.
In 1864, the British zoologist Philip Sclater proposed that a continent once existed in the Indian Ocean, to explain why fossils of lemur relatives were found in both Madagascar and India, and he named it "Lemuria."
Later, when it became clear that continents themselves move over vast spans of time, science stopped using the idea of Lemuria. Yet the image of "an ancient paradise sunk beneath the sea" has lived on in many stories and works of art, and still stirs people's imaginations.
The blue of the sea, particles of the soul
In this painting I layered acrylic paint many times, spreading transparent colors built on blue and green. The many dots are a shimmer like the stars of the universe, or particles of the soul.
The voice of a dugong heard from the depths of the sea. I wanted to paint a quiet, warm resonance that seems to awaken memories from long ago.
Memories the sea remembers
The sea is said to be where life on Earth began. Perhaps the nostalgia we feel when we look at the sea is a distant memory that life itself remembers.
I hope that whenever you see this painting, you feel the gentle memory of the sea flowing within you.
Sources
Ministry of the Environment, Japan (About the dugong) — in Japanese
Ryukyu Shimpo (articles on dugongs and Okinawan legends) — in Japanese
Sclater, P. L. (The Mammals of Madagascar, The Quarterly Journal of Science, 1864)
¥337,000
tax, frame & domestic shipping included
shipping outside Japan: flat ¥8,000
approx. USD $2,250
A one-of-a-kind original painting.
