Koki Osawa

The first painting I ever saw was an imitation drawn by my father as a hobby. It was “Young Girl Reading” depicted by Jean Honoré Fragonard. The portrait of a woman garbed in a lemon-yellow dress and reading in a prone position had already been on the wall of the living room for as long as I can remember. The painting, which I lived with every day, however, was suddenly thrown away by my father as I moved out of my parents’ house. I was tormented by an intense sense of loss. I, however, found myself suffering not from the fact that I could no longer see the woman depicted in it, but rather from the fact that I could no longer witness the yellow used in the painting. Though the quality of the imitation drawn by my father was nothing to be praised, the differences between what he drew and the original had given me a strong sense of my father. This made me think that the imitation he made was existing as both an imitation of “Young Girl Reading”, as well as a “self-portrait” of my father. This experience has given me many hints to think of what paintings really are. To answer the question “Who?”, in this sense, cannot be summed up in one answer. It is not only the titled woman in the painting that was depicted on a flat canvas, but also the presence of my father in the strokes lurk within simultaneously. It is in this way that I hope to grasp who I am with each stroke I take on the canvas. After all, “Who?” may be a question towards myself.