Tsugami Miyuki calls herself a landscape painter. But she is not one whose paintings correspond to this assessment at first glance. Her color-intensive paintings, from small to wall-sized formats, initially remind of paintings in the best tradition of abstract modernism. Voluminous weightings of bright color fields, traces of dynamic strokes, color drifts and color agglomerations in sometimes small-scale, sometimes generous pictorial partitioning dominate her impressive work. Even if vague reminiscences of the figurative and representational occasionally emerge, and hints of spatial depth become apparent, this does little to change the first impression of abstraction. Where has the landscape gone? Contrary to the first impression, Tsugami's paintings are time-images in the landscape, always starting from a concrete time and extending the view back into past times. There is always a fixed date with an equally fixed clock time. At this point in time, the artist is in a certain place in the landscape where she makes a first sketch. A sketch with recognition value - one sees the tree, the cloud, looks at the expanse of a landscape. But what is the artist looking at? There where she sees little visually, but feels much: in the course of time preceding the current time, in lived life, in cultural and scenic changes and far-reaching events. Later, in her studio, the sketches will be transformed into first drafts, far less concrete at this point, more light, more ephemeral and with concentration on a few fleeting image surfaces. In the end, the painting is the result of a multitude of perceptions that transform the change of times in the landscape into a time-space of colours.
CV | Text: Lokalkolorit der Herzen (Wolf Jahn)