Tomihiro Hoshino

富弘美術館  Do you know him?
He was a school gym teacher until at 24, a tragic accident left him paralysed from the neck down. He became a christian and started to paint using his mouth. At 33 he had his first exhibition in Gunma and went on to publish many books and essays.

I thought I vaguely recognized his work from my childhood, hanging on a calender in the kitchen. Flowers, deep reds or mauves or yellows with some squiggly text. If it was him I remember as a teenager turning up my nose at anything less than what I believed to be revolutionary art and poetry. My staple diet of reading at the time being Neitzche and Wittgenstein.

Now as the last bloom of my twenties fades I have re-discovered his work. It makes more sense after living in Japan, it is subtle, quiet. The kind of work that is humble enough to lack big bill boards and probably twitter links.

I was so moved by listening to the poems (in Japanese), I tried the English audio but somehow the strong male australian voice seemed incongruent. His poems and color are simple but lack artifice. They are similar to traditional Haiku in that it is what is not said that is moving. The connection to flowers is a sense of beauty and transcience, pain and hope.

This poem reads:

I have a wound

But your tenderness penetrated through the wounds.

Another one which particularly stuck me on a personal level was one about the Plum trees:

I climbed the river bank to see a fire

The river was in a  village on the other side of the river

The house where the fire broke out

was red like charcoal in the kotatsu heater

There were no sounds nor human voices heard

While I was sitting in the dark

I could smell the fragrance

of the flower