Water Colour on 300 GSM paper (41 x 28 cm)
This piece began as a photograph I took during a trip to Japan around 2014, at a local summer festival. A woman stood ahead of me, seen only from behind, and something about her stillness — the way her neck curved into her shoulders, the cascade of her kimono catching the light — made me reach for my camera without thinking. I didn’t know her name. I never saw her face. But that back view stayed with me for years.
I returned to the photograph in 2016 and began to paint. By then, the moment had already become something else in my memory — quieter, more timeless. Where she had been reading from a phone, I placed a book in her hand, as if shifting her gently into an older, slower world. I elongated her neck and softened her frame, making her more slender than she was in life, because what I remembered was not her body but the feeling of her grace.
The kimono is deep navy, almost indigo, painted in layers of watercolor wash that shift between shadow and sea. Across it bloom large peonies — pink, pale blue, and crimson — their petals loose and bleeding into the fabric as though the flowers are growing out of the silk itself. Small star-like motifs and fine white lines scatter between them, like breath or dust catching lamplight.
Her hair is gathered into a tight, dark bun, coiled with the precision of a brushstroke. Tucked just above her left ear, I placed a cluster of soft pink blossoms with delicate white lace beneath — a kanzashi, a hair ornament that belongs to festivals and fleeting afternoons. It is the only warm colour near her face, and it draws the eye the way the original moment drew mine.
Her right hand rises from the sleeve, pale and deliberate, fingers extended against the open page of the book. The obi at her waist is a muted gold-yellow, embossed with faint floral patterns and folded in structured pleats that contrast with the fluidity of everything above it.
The background is an atmospheric wash of grey, layered and cloudy, as if the festival noise — the lanterns, the music, the crowd — has been dissolved away, leaving only her, suspended in silence.
I painted her from behind because that is how I met her. And perhaps that is why she remains beautiful — because she was never fully mine to know. She was a moment, a glance, a photograph held for three years before it became a painting.