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Fishy art: Yoshikazu Fujioka

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Japanese acrylics and watercolors beyond the ordinary

By Martin Joergensen

Ever since I first discovered Yoshikazu Fujioka's Japanese web site, which was amongst the first fishing related pages I ever found on the web, I was fascinated with his art.
I have always been taken by the Japanese style of doing things and the traditional Japanese art (and culture as a whole) is something that really touches something in me.

	+ Ito Yoshikazu Fujioka
	+ Iwana Yoshikazu Fujioka
	+ Oshorokoma Yoshikazu Fujioka

So when I started researching for the series on fishy artists, it was natural to contact Yoshikazu and ask him to participate.

Luckily he indulged me and returned a nice mail with answers to my poking questions.

Like all the other artists I wanted to know how Yoshikazu started working with art and with fishing related art in particular. He replied:
"I was deeply moved by the beauty of the Trout, which I caught in my first fishing. Since then I began to draw trouts and streams as another pleasure of fishing."

"I want everyone to understand", he continues, and emphasizes his focus on nature, environment and the future:
"We are attracted by the pure nature, but the nature is sacrificed for human life. Our children can enjoy fishing in the beautiful and enriched nature, depends how we can advocate the conservation of nature, and still think about relations with nature. Time has come now to do it."

He uses watercolor or acrylic color as his preferred method of painting, but adds:
"I also like to draw with the pen and water color."

The art is not a source of income for Yoshikazu. As he puts it:
"For me, it is not work to draw a picture."

So Yoshikazu does not sell his pictures. It happens that he draws on request, but not commercially. The artist's daytime job is to design and plan displays and commercial spaces, and living in Kyoto he commutes to Osaka to work.
Yoshikazu also works with other aspects of fishing, and has made and modified equipment and apparel for his own use.
He was also active in starting the fishing club Tsuttenkai in 1979, and even though it's a "name only" club, the members do meet and go fishing together in the Kyoto area.

Some of Yoshikazu's art is available to all of us - and even for free! Anybody can download and print his paper fish, which will then require scissors and glue as well as patience and skill before they appear as three-dimensional models of the beautiful Japanese trout.

Yoshikazu's web site is worth a visit for anyone interested in fishing art as well as Japanese trout species, streams and flies. It covers these subjects very thoroughly and seems to be endless once you start digging into it. And I can only talk about the English part. There is a whole Japanese section as well, for those who can read Kanji.