A road
There is a road in my heart.
It was a road in the wilderness on a summer morning.
This road came to mind while looking at the sketch I made while at Tanesashi Kaigan Ranch in Aomori Prefecture.
This is a sketch of a pasture where the lighthouse can be seen from the hill in front. What if we remove the fences, the grazing horses, the lighthouse, etc., and just draw this road? When I think like this, the shadow of a road lingers in my heart and I can't get rid of it.
Although I am a little worried about whether this composition with only one road can be completed, I don’t want to draw anything else except the road. And what I want to paint is not the scenery of a road in the real world, but a symbolic road. Therefore, it is not that I am trying to draw a road that actually exists in a certain place. If I consider various conditions, I think it would be easier to compose the picture based on the road at Tanesashi Ranch. However, that sketch of the ranch was drawn before World War II, more than ten years ago. Does that road really still look like that now? I have no idea.
If you think about it, it would be in vain to go there. You don’t have to stick to just one path. That was back in Showa 25, so travel conditions were not that good either. However, what I am worried about is not this. I am worried that if the real-life scenery that became the basis of my original creation completely changes, won’t the phantom of this road that I have just formed in my mind become dim? .
Even so, I still want to see it no matter what. At that time, traffic on the Tohoku Main Line was interrupted due to flooding, so I took the Ou Line to bypass Aomori and reach Hachinohe.
I came to the ranch on the Tanesashi coast and found that although the road was desolate, it still passed through the center of the ranch as before, slowly stretching toward the hill with the lighthouse.
"Great, I came to the right place." I stood there motionless and said to myself.