This painting began with pirates and ended in gold. It brings together childhood memories of LEGO ships, the story of William Adams, and my love of Japanese Nanban screens. Inspired by Bosch and Bruegel, and painted with traditional Japanese pigments and gold leaf, it is a floating theatre of folly, drifting between East and West.

As an artist and lover of art history, I've always been fascinated by the unexpected connections between different cultures and artistic...

"Some will say they do not wish to dream their lives away. As if life itself were not a dream, a very real dream from which there is no...

Foujita (1886-1968) is an artist I have come to appreciate more and more over time; not just his depiction of cats and nudes, but also...

In my studies of the Rinpa school in Japan and their techniques for my own paintings, I suddenly realised something that I didn't think...

I recently painted two cats on gold leaf with mineral pigment. In composition I wanted them to mirror each other like the Gods of Wind...

Junichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) once wrote an aesthetic treatise titled 'In Praise of Shadows'. The essay discusses traditional Japanese...

A major part of traditional Japanese and Chinese painting is the use of mineral pigments. Nowadays, colours and paint can be made...

Sizing paper in the context I’m going to discuss isn’t about measuring the size, but rather applying a ‘sizing’ solution (usually some...