Roses and a Girl

Kaita Murayama belonged to a generation of artists who sought ways of expressing individual feeling through painting rather than simply adhering to established academic standards. his brief career coincided with a period of significant cultural change in Japan, when western artistic ideas were being absorbed, challenged and reinterpreted within the country's developing modern art institutions. His expressive approach emerged through his encounter with modern painting, his training in Japan and his own literary and emotional preoccupations. Roses and a girl, is an oil painting on canvas dating to 1917. At first glance, the composition appears straightforward: a young girl stands before a profusion of flowering roses, her figure set against a dense field of vegetation. Yet the painting's force lies in the tension between its familiar subject and its unusual treatment. The girl's conspicuously flushed cheeks, the saturated presence of the flowers, and the directness of the painterly handling give the scene an intensity that exceeds the conventions of a quiet garden portrait. The composition places a young girl before a dense background of roses. The flowering plants occupy much of the pictorial space, surrounding the figure with a vivid field of colour and foliage. The intensity of the colour and the emphatic presence of the figure suggest that the subject has been filtered through the artist's own sensibility.