初見良昭 In addition to his background as a martial artist and doctor, Dr. Masaaki Hatsumi is a highly respected writer, actor, and artist. Dr. Hatsumi is an accomplished artist of brush and ink in the Nihonga style. His art work has been exhibited at the Nagai Gallery of Tokyo and in Paris, France.

• Nihonga! Japanese Style Painting :

日本画 "Japanese-style painting" is the pictures using traditional skill and material of Japan.What mainly ground a natural minerals is used as paints, and glue is used as adhesives.Mineral colors are grind or heat to change the tone of their natural color.Metal foil, powder, shell powder, soil, others are used.It's paint on various things, such as Japanese paper (very long and strong fiber) , silk, board and others.

The term, created in the 19th century to distinguish traditional painting methods from Western-influenced art, has often been synonymous with art of the past. Its practitioners incorporate time-honored materials such as silk, rice-paper, ground semi-precious minerals as well as gold and silver leaf into their paintings. Nihonga artists have tended to look to the visual forms and conventions of the past during most of this century. This most recent generation of Nihonga painters, however, has reinvigorated the style and is changing the way it is perceived. The five artists of Nihonga: The New Tradition are at once the inheritors of a rich past and the harbingers of a dynamic future. All of these artist work within the Nihonga tradition, but each has found a stylistic approach that is both powerful and contemporary.

• Materials

Nihonga are typically executed on washi (Japanese paper) or silk, using brushes. The paintings can be either monochrome or polychrome. If monochrome, typically sumi (Chinese ink) made from soot mixed with a glue from fishbone or animal hide is used. If polychrome, the pigments are derived from natural ingredients: minerals, shells, corals, and even semi-precious stones like garnets or pearls. The raw materials are powdered into 10 gradations from fine to sand grain textures. In both cases, water is used; hence Nihonga is by definition a sub-genre of watercolor painting. Initially, Nihonga were produced for hanging scrolls (kakemono), hand scrolls (emakimono) or folding screens (byobu). However, most are now made to be displayed in frames, similar to Western-style paintings.

• Techniques

In monochrome Nihonga, the technique depends on the modulation of ink tones from darker through lighter to obtain a variety of shadings from near white, through grey tones to black. In polychrome Nihonga, great emphasis is placed on the presence or absence of outlines; typically outlines are not used for depictions of birds or plants. Occasionally, washes and layering of pigments are used to provide contrasting effects, and even more occasionally, gold or silver foil may also be incorporated into the painting.