ST065 Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art

Snow Treasure

Painting size: 16cm x 23cm

Framing size: 28cm x 35cm

The quiet, verdant slope that ascends alongside Kenrokuen Garden, with the sky covered in greenery, is Hirozaka, and it connects to Honda no Mori. At the top of that slope is the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art.

Kanazawa City is home to the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, which is very popular nationwide for its contemporary art, but I often visit the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art. That's simply because there are things there that I want to see.

I saw here Matisse's paintings that captured happy spaces, Tsuguharu Fujita's lines that were both delicate and strong, and Modigliani's paintings with backgrounds that seemed to draw you deep into something.

While landscape paintings are usually painted horizontally, the Small Treasure series is entirely vertical. This is intended to allow the viewer to imagine the negative space within the painting and expand the sense of space, but this vertical composition is difficult to achieve.

The sign for "Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art" should ideally include all the letters, but in this painting, only "Museum" is clearly legible.

The key point is the placement of the streetlights and the museum entrance. The entrance is depicted not in the center, but slightly to the right.

This allowed us to create a more expansive space.