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With each passing moment, I become emptier and emptier.
Originally, most of my life was as empty as a vacuum cleaner.

Masaki Toki
1964 Born in Nagoya, Japan
1988 Graduated from Tama Art University, Department of Oil Painting, Susumu Miyazaki/Shingo Imai Class

One of the poems by Takashi Okada, an acquaintance of mine, is titled "There it is," which reminds me of my own continuous failure to draw. In another poem, he says, "What is not drawn is hidden. In another poem, he says, "What is not drawn is hidden, and what is not drawn does not appear. What is hidden by confronting the failure to draw as a manifestation? Does it mean the time that can be seen but cannot be measured? I created this work with these thoughts in mind.
The title "September 9" is the birthday of my mother, who will turn 86 this year. The day will arrive during the exhibition period. By using the date as the title, I hoped to shake the viewer's sense of time. The process of making this work began by stretching canvas over a wooden frame for oil painting, applying more than ten coats of acrylic primer, and then drawing lines with watercolor pencils and acrylic paints using plants as motifs. The lines are drawn as closely as possible to my line of sight. Sometimes my line of sight follows the outline of the motif and sometimes it does not, so the painted plants do not retain their original form. I have refrained from using color in this work so as not to evoke a three-dimensional image.

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