Gripping a paintbrush and a crayon, the artist known as Thumbelina splotches and splats with merry abandon, the one-year-old star of a Tokyo exhibition that goes on way past her bedtime.
Abstract paintings by the toddler are on sale for ￥33,000 (US$232.92) at her debut show at the hip gallery Decameron, tucked above a bar in the Kabukicho red-light district.
Thumbelina’s vivid style is “babyish, but mysteriously dexterous,” gallery director — and matchmaker of her parents — Dan Isomura said.
Photo: AFP
“I thought: ‘Wow, these are legit artworks,’” Isomura said, describing his first impression of her free-form creations.
Colorful smudges adorn tatami mats and tables at the 21-month-old’s suburban home, where her mother patiently helps twist open paint tubes and squeeze them onto paper.
“I can see this rhythm in her movements and patterns ... she knows what she’s doing,” said the evacuee from Ukraine in her 20s, asking to remain anonymous.
As a fellow artist focusing on Japanese calligraphy, she is “jealous” of her daughter’s first solo exhibition, she joked, adding that of course “I’m happy, as a mom.”
Once she thought her daughter might help her with work, but now “I’m her assistant,” she said.
After Russia invaded in 2022, Thumbelina’s mother left Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region — her “very pathological, violent” homeland torn apart by war.
She moved to Japan, after consulting a Web site helping Ukrainians find housing worldwide.
A chance seating beside contemporary artist Isomura, who had only boarded due to two delayed flights, changed her life.
Amazed to learn they were both artists, the pair kept in touch, and later, through Isomura’s introduction, she met her future husband.
“Dan is our angel, you know, like Cupid,” she said.
The couple then had Thumbelina — not her real name — whose paintings inspired 32-year-old Isomura.
At first he had assumed the toddler was “scribbling randomly, like she was playing in the mud.”
However, when he saw Thumbelina in action, “she seemed to signal each time she considered her drawing complete,” prompting her mother to give her a fresh sheet.
That Thumbelina sometimes demands a specific color, develops shapes from paint droplets and finishes voluntarily suggests a will at work, he said.
“Some may say her mother’s involvement means these are not Thumbelina’s works,” but “for a baby, a mother is part of their body,” Isomura said.
In any case, adult artists are not fully independent, as they rarely break free of store-bought paints or conventional canvases, he said.
“We operate under the illusion of solitary creation, while in fact we rely heavily on systems built by others,” he said.
The exhibition, Isomura’s first as director of Decameron, opened last month and runs until the middle of next month.
Most of the time it is on, from 8pm until 5am, Thumbelina would likely be fast asleep.
One recent night at the gallery, an admiring visitor said the paintings had an innocent charm.
“We instinctively try to draw skillfully,” because “we’ve grown used to having our paintings evaluated by others,” 45-year-old Yuri Kuroda said. “But it feels like she doesn’t care at all about whether it’s good or bad... It’s a mindset we can never return to.”
So would she pay US$230 to take one home?
“I’m tempted,” Kuroda said with a chuckle.
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