Mieko Hara

Mieko Hara was born in Oita Japan. She lived in Tokyo from 1987 to 1996, working as a freelance illustrator for publishers such as, Kodansha, Shueisha, Shogakukan, Sony music magazines, Player, Rockin On, Latina and for record companies, Sony Music, Toshiba EMI.She has provided art illustration, comics and short stories for prominent Japanese bands such as Unicorn, Checkers, Yoshiyuki Ohsawa, Senri Oe and Hoppy Kamiyama. One of her original works is in the collection of the Brazilian singer Milton Nascimento.  Most recently she has created CD cover art for the group Sentinel.She left Japan on 1996 and briefly lived in Sydney, Australia and Oahu, Hawaii before settling in Manhattan where she continued studies at The Art Student League from 1998-2001. She traveled throughout Europe and South East Asia before moving to California in 2003 where she studied at California College of Art. She currently lives and works in Oakland.
I approach painting without any preconceived notion or image, but with an improviser’s mind, setting the visual elements into play until a kind of balance or resolution is achieved.  Admittedly, this point of resolution is subjective, though I myself impose neither subjective nor narrative frames on the image in favor of chance incidents of process which function first as my guides and then as my intention.   My painterly style is gestural and I like to think of the brushwork as possessing a kind of movement akin to photography or film.  In recent work I have employed collage techniques that emphasize depth of field and the relationship between microscopic and macroscopic forms.