Shinjuku-eki
Oil on canvas · 70 × 100 cm · 2020
On Unsplash I found a freely licensed photograph by Eutah Mizushima: a woman waiting on a subway platform, with a blurred background. It looked like a good opportunity to learn how to fake motion blur in oil.
I painted with two different whites — zinc white, cool and slightly gray, for the hazy background, and titanium white, warmed up with a touch of chromium yellow, for her pullover in the foreground. The photo was taken at Shinjuku Station in Tokyo, which gave me the title: “Shinjuku-eki”, Japanese for “Shinjuku Station”.
Once the painting was done, I emailed Eutah a photo of it — a photo of a painting of a photo, which could in principle go on forever if either of us felt like it. He wrote back to say he liked it, a nice way to close the loop: back to where it all started, just with a lot more oil paint involved.