I am Yuki Tanaka. I paint rain-lit lantern paths in Kyoto and Tokyo – wet stone, maple reds and cherry pinks against indigo, one small figure with an umbrella. I keep coming back to the moment weather changes how far you can see. This piece is the torii tunnel at Fushimi, which goes a thousand gates deeper than you can walk in one visit.
Ruby called the knife texture on the gates “a powerful invitation into a rain-soaked journey.” That is exactly right, and it is also the technical problem I spent two years solving.
Rain makes orange glow differently
The torii at Fushimi are vermillion, which is orange with red in it. In sun they are bright. In rain they are something else – darker but more luminous, as if the wet paint is still drying. I use cadmium orange and alizarin crimson, applied thick with a palette knife, then glazed over while the surface is still ridged. The glaze catches in the valleys and leaves the peaks alone.
Most painters smooth that texture out. I leave it because wet wood does not reflect evenly.
The umbrella is eight millimetres wide
The figure is far inside the tunnel, small enough that you might miss her. I paint her last, in a single session, with a rigger brush. If I stop and come back the scale shifts and she reads as closer. The umbrella is Prussian blue – the only cool colour in a composition of warm ones – because that is what pulls your eye past the first twenty gates.
The original is 24 x 36 inches, portrait orientation, which is the shape of the tunnel itself. You are standing at the bottom looking up.
I time these to the rainy season
Valentina said I captured “the wet, glowing ambiance of the torii tunnel,” and I do not disagree, but I will add this: I can only paint this subject in June and September, when the humidity in my studio matches the humidity in Kyoto. The paint needs to stay workable for forty minutes. In dry air it skins over and the knife drags instead of sculpting.
I work in threes – three rain-lit paths each season, always a torii, a shrine approach and a covered market. This is the torii for autumn 2024.
For: Anyone who has walked into weather and kept going. Not for: people who want the torii in sun.
Gallery-wrapped canvas, in 3 sizes — 12×16, 16×20, 18×24 in. Ships free within the continental US.
