Guest Gallery
Kuniharu Shimizu
A Dream of Waves

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Kuniharu Shimizu was born in Nara, Japan, and received BFA from University of Hawaii. He writes, "When I started painting at college, I used to take photographs and worked from them. I seem to like the photographic accuracy. At times when I got tired of meticulously doing realistic paintings, I was tempted to go into abstract. My instructors told me not to, reminding me that I was a born realistic painter. [But] when I got exposed to computer graphics, I liked it right off. I have been using Adobe Illustrator most of the time, making graphics and illustrations using a mouse (it has become like my hand by now)."

For the past seven years, Shimizu has also been involved with haiku poems. He collaborates with haiku poets from all over the world, and made more than 1000 haiga (haiku painitings), and is an advisor to the World Haiku Association. He says, "My association with haiku poets influenced me to do artistic illustrations. By artistic, I mean the pictures with poetic content. I am not much concerned about the newness of appearance, which is often considered a valuable thing in digital art works. I rather put in some substantial content in my digital works so that the viewer can extract many layers of meanings from them."