Kiyoka Yamagata is a painter who interweaves emotional memories with colors.
She depicts the hidden beauty in everyday life with vivid colors, awakening emotions that lie dormant deep within the heart. Having painted since childhood, she has been exhibiting her works both domestically and internationally since 2009. Her colorful works, born from a dialogue between emotion and material, stir the viewer's heart and invite them into a landscape of emotions.
Her works are an attempt to reconstruct the movements of the heart, which words cannot capture, into color, form, and space. It is also a journey to express the emotions that lie dormant deep within the heart through the language of color. The source of inspiration lies in the beauty hidden in everyday life: the beauty in casual landscapes, the emotions expressed in people's faces, the endearing figures of animals. These suddenly appear in her memory with vivid colors. Colors linked to various emotions such as joy, sorrow, sadness, and hope resonate with memories of past events and encounters, greatly influencing her work. It's as if fragments of emotion shine again, bathed in the light of color.
By ruminating on these elements, she carefully layers colors over time until the emotion appears in its purest form. While mainly using oil paints, she creates diverse textures by combining various materials such as acrylics, crayons, and oil pastels. Not only brushes and knives, but also painting directly with her hands creates a soulful exchange, as if engraving emotions directly onto the canvas. Sometimes emotions take precedence, and sometimes materials lead. Chance is also an important element in her work, and new discoveries and beauty are born from unpredictable events. It's as if she herself is exploring a landscape of emotions, searching for a path.
The vivid and diverse colors not only express vitality and dynamism but also symbolize the richness of emotion. The layers of colors and brushstrokes express the fluctuations of emotion and the passage of time, while the matière expresses layers of memory and the depth of emotion. Her work is characterized by expressing a psychological structure that cannot be captured by conflicting elements, even while containing them, such as her own experiential memories and reality, the present and the past.
Yamagata's works are a landscape of emotions. She strives to create art that gently resonates, providing moments of emotional connection and rediscovery of sensations, hoping that viewers will encounter their own emotions in her works and rediscover the rich sensibilities that lie dormant in their hearts. And the vivid colors represent a journey of hope.