I have no artistic talent. So much so that I can appear on Ame Talk as a comedian with no artistic talent.
When I was in elementary school, I attended (or was forced to attend) an art class.
The class started with croquis and watercolors, and moved on to oil painting in the upper grades.
However, I was so tone deaf when it came to art that I didn’t realize I had no artistic talent when I was young, so I simply assumed that I would naturally move on to oil painting when I became a junior high school student.
However, one day I had a meeting with my teacher (I don’t remember his name, he was a regular at the Nitten Exhibition) who gently advised me that if I really wanted to do oil painting, he wouldn’t stop me, but that it would be better for me to continue with watercolors.
He also told me that painting tools cost money and take time, but now I think that it would be a waste of time for me to do it. Art classes were quite popular, so I guess I became a candidate for class restructuring.
My artistic talent was crushed, and in the watercolor painting course, surrounded by students younger than me, I didn’t improve and I lost motivation, so before I knew it, I stopped going to classes. Soon, my life as an artist came to an end.
So, those who know that I have absolutely no artistic talent tend to assume that I must like looking at paintings, but in fact, I do like looking at paintings.
On the contrary, it is because of my strange lack of artistic talent that I can look at the paintings lined up in front of me, completely free from technical perspectives or knowledge of painting history, without any consideration (or so I think).
Anyway, if you ask me if this Jean-Michel Fauro exhibition was worth seeing, I would say “it was good.” However, if you ask me if I would like to see it again, the answer is “Once would be good.”
However, as a writer, I thought that the name “Imaginary Travel Guide” was an excellent introductory phrase for the exhibition. In any case, it just sounds good. I feel like it nicely captures the atmosphere of his work. I feel like this naming was a winning strategy.
In fact, the museum was bustling with visitors, lured by the imaginary guide.
By the way, when I think back to the exhibitions in the past that made me want to see them again, the ones that come to mind are Paul Klee, Umehara Ryuzaburo, Kandinsky, and Ikeda Masuo, which are currently being held in Nagoya at the same time.
Just this repertoire shows that my taste in paintings is ridiculously inconsistent.
It doesn’t reflect any school of thought or preference, like a preference for Impressionism or any other school. It’s just the “desire” to see it again. In a way, it may be the same as a movie or a TV drama.
But when it comes to paintings, it’s the hardest to put into words the reason why you want to see them again. It’s simply a matter of whether you want to see them or not.
Perhaps it was a fault of not having studied painting enough to be able to talk about it in words, or perhaps if I had studied it more deeply, I might have been able to enjoy appreciating paintings more. I don’t know.
Still, if I were to try to put it into words, I found Jean-Michel Fauro’s works, especially his early ones, to be very good, as they reminded me of the atmosphere of Hoshi Shinichi, whom I liked.
However, I am not the only one who felt that the imaginary travel guide changed from a fantasy world to a “guide to reality” after he was inspired by political ideas and environmental issues halfway through and began to include social messages in his paintings.
If he had continued his far-flung fantasy travels until the very end of his life, beyond the constraints of real politics and society, he might have shown us a new fantasy world that was far far away and that no one had ever seen before.
“An unknown journey at an art exhibition on a winter afternoon”
