Every single life is colorful. Human, animals, plants, landscape as a whole ....

Toshi Esumi
Part-time artist, started in 2002
Born in Japan, moved to the U.S. in 1995 
Primary media: oil, pastel  Primary subjects: landscape, animals

When I started drawing and painting in a class room at night at UW (University of Washington, Seattle) I knew nothing about them. But soon I learned I loved creating art. I started with a very precise way of making shapes, but moved away from it once I realized playing with colors was far more interesting and what I wanted to do.

I’m always inspired by scenery and animals as a part. I see colorful lives in those subjects. I want to recreate them on canvas, or on papers, with lights that make those lives livelier and more impressive. To pursue this desire, I go to workshops and demos, and browse magazines, and watch videos and DVDs to explore different ways by different artists. But my works still tend to come out of a complicated mixture of accidents, rather than the result of calculated efforts for color contrast and harmony, value variations and light, and the composition.

I’m also trying to go outside as much as possible to study directly from the subjects, even though most of my finished works were created in my studio from photos. Eventually I want to become skillful to finish pieces on site but that would be a totally different type of artworks. That would also limit the size of works, which I don’t like.