I don’t know how it was for you when you were twenty but for me it was a very hard time.
I lived alone.
There was no girlfriend, no friends, no drinking or nightclubbing.
I could have been living the life of a monk except there was no God in my life either.
I had a part-time dead-end job in a supermarket and was ‘studying’ at college.
In reality, I was really like a piece of driftwood just floating around without any meaning or purpose.
I lived in a silent room with no TV, radio or computer.
My only company, was the thoughts in my head.
I’ve never found those thoughts to be reassuring, quite the opposite.
Years later, I learnt to pay them no attention and that has served me well.
You may think life could not be worse.
But it could.
For there was always the weekly walk to the laundrette.
Abandon all hope ye that enter was how I felt about entering this place.
It was the “mundane” in full force and it seemed to suck all possible magic out of life – not that my life had much magic in it at this time either.
It was probably for this reason that I would take a fantasy novel with me.
The book acted as a magical talisman protecting me against the mundanity of the laundrette.
And my favorite writer was Jack Vance.
There was a kind of magic about his writing, a wonderful exoticness of far away places on other planets, that totally removed me from the laundrette.
And I think the exoticness of far away places attracted me to Japan.
I had dreams of living in a traditional wooden Japanese house in the middle of a rice field.
In reality I ended up living in a 3 storey concrete apartment.
And I found out that modern Japan was actually pretty ugly.
Tidy but ugly.
It was only through trips into the countryside that I started to see the beautiful Japan that I had dreamed about.
And one day I found the exotic and magical Japan that I’d hoped for.
It was a place that seemed to be quintessential Japan.
It’s called Sasebo and it is in Nagasaki prefecture.
When I first arrived at this place I almost drove the car off a bridge as I got mesmerized by the view of a huge American naval fleet.
It was the first time I’d ever seen such a sight.
But even more mesmerizing was the boat trip I took later around some of the 200 islands.
The shape of some of these islands is strange and beautiful.
And for me the scene in the painting above with those strangely shaped islands is the kind of thing that the romantic in me was looking for.
There is something magical here and I keep returning to the photographs I took of these islands and painting another picture.
In the painting above I wanted to emphasize that magicalness by attempting a moonlit scene.
I think I succeeded somewhat.
And that will do for now,
Gareth.
Postscript
I tried to translate the title of this painting “Exotic Islands in the Moonlight” into Japanese and found that the word exotic in Japanese is batakusai (バタ臭い) which literally means smelly butter.
And I further learnt that this phrase is what Japanese people used to call Westerners.
