Painting
Let’s Go Home Gramps
acrylic on canvas, 50 x 100 cm
2022
This painting stems from a scene I encountered on an overcast afternoon in Nara, back in November 2019. I remember it clearly—a quiet moment that seemed to stretch between two worlds. An elderly woman stood near the edge of the park, her voice soft but insistent, calling her husband back home. He, however, had been caught in a different conversation. Not with another person, but with a deer—one without antlers. The scene unfolded slowly, as though time itself had slowed to a murmur, the world holding its breath in the brief exchange between man and animal.
The deer, stripped of its majestic antlers, appeared almost vulnerable, yet oddly serene. There was something in its stillness that made me pause, as if it had accepted the inevitability of losing its crown each year—its antlers, mere extensions of itself, made from the same material as human fingernails. A strange connection, really, how something so sharp, so powerful, could be as fragile as that. In Nara, the antlers of the more aggressive males are ceremonially cut each autumn, a ritual to maintain harmony between the deer and the people who share the space. It’s a way to help the animals and humans coexist peacefully, as though some unspoken truce had been etched into the rhythms of the town.
And yet, I couldn’t help but think of the cycles of loss and renewal the deer must endure. The antlers fall off at the end of winter, discarded like the remnants of an old self. By spring, new antlers emerge, pushing through the surface, a quiet reminder that even in loss, there is the promise of growth. The image of the deer lingered long after, threading itself into the folds of memory.
This painting became my way of capturing that moment—of exploring what it means to shed something old, to let go, and wait for something new to take its place. The green that fills the canvas is intentional. In the language of colors, green is renewal. It’s the color of fresh beginnings, of quiet hope. Farewells and beginnings, I think, are always intertwined. The woman called to her husband, and for a second, I imagined she wasn’t just calling him back from the deer. She was calling him away from one life and into another, as though they were both standing at the edge of something vast and unknowable.
In the quiet of that November afternoon, beneath the gray sky and the bare branches, everything felt like a prelude—an unfinished story, waiting for its next chapter to unfold.