More Japanese sayings

This morning I got up at my usual hour and at a stroke finished a work I’d been too tired to complete the night before, though most of the work had been done before I went to bed.

These two paintings are based, like to other works (at the framers’), on Japanese sayings Yukiko my former wife kindly gave me. “Tana kara botamochi” means ‘A lucky break’ and “Mago ni mo ishou” means ‘Clothes make the man’ which isn’t easily translatable directly into English but translates directly as “Even the horse-boy has clothes”.

I got these “kotowaza” or “sayings” from Yukiko on 22 December but hadn’t done works based on them until now for various reasons mainly because I was working on other things.

When I completed the first two works in Japanese (the ones now at the framers’) I made them on four sheets of A5 paper but as you can see the new ones are on only a single sheet.

This innovation is the direct result of my work over the past month as I took a break from painting over the New Year only getting back to it in January in fact toward the end of the month. My practice got a boost when at the beginning of February I sold a painting on the street to an acquaintance. Since 3 Feb I’ve been painting steadily limiting myself to single sheets.

As with writing sonnets the limitation of single A5 sheets frees me up to find savings elsewhere. By keeping the works small in size I can also share them more easily because you can quickly chuck a few in your bag when you go out and show people what you’ve done no matter where you are.

'A lucky break', 2023.

'Clothes make the man', 2023.