Tinker Bell's Whisper   

     I am happy now because I began drawing pictures in January this year. While
I was young, I liked drawing very much, so I wanted to be a cartoonist. I contributed
my works to some publishers, some of which were published. I enjoyed drawing
pictures until I left elementary school, but I completely quit drawing when I
entered junior high school. In fact, I came to be very keen on study instead.

     Six years passed after that. I entered university and became interested in art
again. While I was in university, I mainly began drawing from plaster casts and
eagerly did preliminary sketches. I dabbled at oil painting, but I was deadlocked,
although I did not remember why I stopped. Moreover, in my university days, I was
going to major in aesthetics and art history in a postgraduate course, but my mother
was strongly opposed to my plan. Her reason was a little bit complicated. I want the
audience to remember that aesthetics and art history belonged to the department of
philosophy. That is, my mother hated philosophy because a son of her friend, who
majored in philosophy, had committed suicide. Consequently, my academic specialty
changed into theology. My memory of those days was a bittersweet one.

Because of this memory, I am excited to have begun painting in oils lately.
Especially, I belong to a society for the study of preparatory drawings of JAG (Japan
Artist Group) and started to learn rough sketches. Our group mainly draws nude
female models. I have done many preliminary sketches in the last four months.
Additionally, I have got a complete suite of painting instruments such as an easel,
thirty tubes of oil colors, twenty paint brushes, three canvases, ten sketchbooks,
charcoal papers, some bottles of megilp, conte (crayons), fusains, pastels and so on.
Of course, they cost me a lot of money, but how pleasant it is for me to buy all these
painting materials!

I drew some rough sketches recently, and at last I painted one of my favorite
dessin (a preparatory drawing) in oil, which was a nude young woman sitting on the
grass. It was my long-time dream to complete an oil painting. However, a strange
phenomenon occurred concerning the picture. I was keeping the picture on the easel
and always appreciating it while I was in my room. After a while, however, I was
unable to stand the bad smell given out by the oil painting which had not become
completely dry. So I moved it into another room and put it on the floor so that it might
get dry soon. Unfortunately, I stepped on it just on the day when I finished drawing the
picture. Against my will, I took it into my room again and leaned it against the closed
door of the closet. However, the picture, which had still not become dry, fell down on
the floor suddenly. I became quite nervous. In the end I had to put the picture back
on the easel.

At that time, a strange feeling attacked me. That is, I felt as if the woman in the
picture was crying; I am here and let me not go anywhere. Although I transferred her to
some places, she refused to stay there. It is true that the woman in the picture was just
painted, but she is like something rising above the picture. She was crying; “I have to be
by your side,” just as Tinker Bell, the fairy, was whispering to Peter Pan; “I am here and
I love you.” I thought that the woman in the picture is like a fairy that cannot speak.
Hence I decided to title my maiden oil painting “Tinker Bell’s Whisper.”