About the Lab: An Attempt to Show What Comes Before Completion

For a long time I believed a painting was something you show only at the moment it is finished.

Yet before a single painting comes into being, there lies a stretch of time that no one ever sees.
Meeting a motif, pausing, trying materials, failing, scraping back, layering again.
A painting that looks still when you see only the finished work has, before that point, never stopped moving.

This Lab is a place to keep a record of that "before completion".

■ Six stages

Here I divide the flow of making into six stages.

06　Origin — meeting the motif. A private beginning, not yet shown to anyone.
05　Concept — searching, through words and sketches, for what should happen on the picture plane.
04　Material — acrylic, resin and other techniques. Time spent in dialogue with matter.
03　Making — layering. Drying. Waiting. Deciding. Over and over.
02　Adjustment — checking under the light and deciding the last few millimetres.
01　Finishing as a work — signing it and sending it out into the world as a single painting.

The smaller the number, the closer the painting comes to its public face.
The line traced from top to bottom on the Lab page is something I intend to write about, one stage at a time, from the inside, in these articles.

■ Why show it

There is only one reason.
I believe the value of a painting lies not only in its finished surface, but in the time that has hardened within it.

Each layer of paint dries holding the very judgement made on the day the brush was laid down.
No two of my paintings are the same because the same time never flows twice.

I will record part of that time here.
When you encounter a finished work, I hope these records will deepen it, if only a little.

Articles will be updated irregularly, following the progress of the work.
Without hurrying, but without stopping.