Yoshino Masui paints a scene with animals against minutely painted background in watercolor. A web of countless dots and lines obsessively fill the painterly space, and it reminds one of a forest, or a flower, or maybe some multiplying cells. The repeated combination of small similar shapes seems decorative at a first glance, however, as the artists comments “my deeply sinful karma” or an ever chasing disquieting feeling could well be projected.
At her first solo show in 2006, she had taken an automatism technique, to trace the shape of dropped watercolor on the paper to create a pattern. However this time, the technique has changed though the supporting material and used paint stayed the same. The effect, the contrasting the lines made out of chance and intention, has increased complexity, by having the base color dried and painted over and over without outlines. The depicted animals such as horses and ravens are painted out of the artist’s observation as she commuted to horse race tracks. “I considered dogs and cats as my surrogate family, and had followed them for many hours” says the artist, and this original landscape from the artist’s adolescence is expressed in vivid colors and unique painterly style.