Woman with a Hen 女と鶏

Wakita, who studied drawing for four years in Germany, originally produced strictly realistic works. But after the war, he came to attach equal importance to both "representation" (figurative work) and "creation" (abstract work), and continued producing while shifting his focus between the two. Around 1955, in addition to concentrating on "creation," he started to place a stylized bird at the center of his pictures to give them a distinct tone of his own. The bird often appears in Wakita's works accompanying human figures, and children in particular. It was, to him, both "a lovely subject matter" and "a stubborn material" with which it was not easy to get the desired effect. The artist faced this particular motif patiently and turned it into a vehicle of rich emotions. In this work, the solid form of the female figure and the bird stand out with the vertical and horizontal black lines against the overall texture of thin layers of paint in delicate colours. In these elements, we can sense the artist's strength to keep his aloofness while using soft and sweet motifs and his determination to make new creations that defy existing forms.