Yusuke Muraki

Sunlight pours down through the leaves, dripping water gives rise to streams, and the wind strikes the mountains, swirls, and dances up into the sky.
Trees reach toward the heavens and put down roots in the earth; connected with all manner of living things, they endure the seasons and fulfill their lives.
The balance that arises there is, I feel, nothing less than a miracle.

I surrender body and mind to the images I receive from nature, layering them one upon another on the canvas. As I paint, moving back and forth between the conscious and the unconscious, between chance and intention, the presence of animals at some point rises up from within the abstract forms. I call them “Disappeared Animals.”

For me, painting is not a means of depicting nature. It is a place for encountering once again what cannot be seen, what has been lost, and the presence that undeniably exists there. In that moment, painting becomes a gate connecting the human world with the world of the wild.