Through the eyes of Takura Suzuki

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background? 

So, I was born in Japan, but I’ve lived in the States for 10 years now, and this experience made me think a lot about where I belong, like many others do. 

How has this experience influenced your thoughts about belonging and identity? 

Living between different cultures made me realise that identity is not something fixed in my opinion. It keeps changing depending on where you live or where you are, what language you speak, or what kind of culture or environment you are in, and this feeling of being in different places is something that naturally becomes part of my work. 

What materials do you work with and why are they important to your practice? 

Materials are very important for me because my paintings are built slowly in many layers. I mostly use acrylic and I really love Winsor & Newton paints because the colours stay strong even after, you know, I paint over them many times. One colour I use a lot is Quinacridone Magenta. It’s very strong, it’s very saturated. Depending on how I use it, it can also be soft, which I really love about it. 

Is there anything new you’ve been developing or experimenting with recently in your practice? 

I also use modelling paste to build texture, so the surface keeps the marks of the process. That’s a new thing that I’m trying to develop in my practise using modelling paste and keeps the mark of the process. 

Can you tell us about your recent work, and the ideas behind it? 

Recently, my work has been about trying to find a place to stand in a world where everything keeps changing. I work within the tradition of still life, but I use objects from the world around me. For example, in a recent painting called Silk Breathing, I use the Clorox bottle as a base with flowers and butterflies around it. The Clorox can suggest cleaning or disinfecting, and the flowers suggest life and death, and butterflies suggest both, like death and rebirth. When these things sit together in one painting, it becomes a way to show how the world can feel unstable. 

Where do you find your inspiration for your paintings? 

Many of the objects in my paintings come from things I see. In daily life. Everyday life like ads, product packages or images I come across in social media, for example, I don’t paint those scenes directly. I collect fragments of them and bring them back to the studio, and I build a steel life competition from them by putting very different kind of object together. I can create, you know, relationship that don’t really exist in real life, and that’s where the meaning of the painting starts to appear. 

Explore Takura's top picks for his acrylic practice below, or shop the acrylic range