It takes less than 10 minutes, and sometimes as little as two, for Japanese artist Akie Nakata to sell her hand-painted stones on Facebook. Mere seconds after sharing a photo of her latest creation, a fan will step up to buy it.
Although Nakata sells her work through the Seizan Gallery in Tokyo and Tokyo’s Ginza Mitsukoshi Department Store, Facebook has provided a way to expand her audience outside Japan. Her Facebook group currently has nearly 85,000 followers.
Nakata’s pieces are palm-sized river stones featuring detailed images of lifelike animals, which she paints with acrylic gouache paint. Her pieces have sold for between $300 and $1,500.
Letting the Animal Emerge
Her artistic process doesn’t start with an intent to paint a particular animal, rather, the rocks she sees guide her. “I paint the animal that I feel is inside the stone, following the backbone and the body structure that is visible on the stone,” she explains. “I believe it is the stone that decides what is to be painted, rather than me deciding…I color the animals that I feel inside the stones, so as to let them manifest on the surface.”
Self-taught painter Akie Nakata studied art education in college.
Akie Nakata
“What I aspire to draw is something that gets newly born in my hand, through my dialogues with the stones. I want to paint the ‘life’ of the animals that I felt in the stone,” she says. “At the end of my painting process, when I put my brush onto the stone to paint the eyes, there is this moment I feel it is completed, when the eyes look back at me.”
“As a work mode, it’s important for me to never alter the shape of the stone at all – no polishing/sanding, or no application of any undercoat material,” Nakata says.
Her work has included animals ranging from dogs to birds to lions, cats, owls, lambs, fish, elephants, opossum, turtles, koala bears, and polar bears, to name a few. Although she has been painting since 2010, she says she has “encountered only five stones harboring an octopus.”
The animals Akie Nakata paints on the stones she collects from area riverbeds reveal themselves to … [+] her.
Akie Nakata
Nakata collects her stones on several favorite riverbanks in Saitama, where she goes to look for “good encounters with the stones.” Through those encounters, the animal images emerge to her. “The stones are not canvases to me; they are more collaborative partners that I encounter on riverbanks,” she says. “More often than not, I am blessed with good encounters and take home with me several stones, but on other days I might not be so fortunate,” returning home empty-handed.
A Born Artist
Nakata’s foray into painting stones happened almost by chance, when she was walking on a riverbank during her university days and “encountered a stone that simply looked like a rabbit,” she recalls. “I loved it and took it home, and I painted it as the stone led me.”
“I’ve always loved drawing, natural stones, and animals – all living things,” she says. However, her university training wasn’t strictly in art – it was in art education. “I studied in the department of education, to become a junior high school teacher,” she says, studying “the general range of art curriculum.” However, her painting process is self-taught.
Today she dedicates herself to her craft full-time. This year her goal is to create more than 100 pieces, though she says her workload, or productivity, varies depending on whether she has gallery exhibitions scheduled.
In addition to Facebook, Nakata has an account on Instagram and Twitter, where she posts her work as they become available. She has not used any form of paid advertising and has organically amassed 105,000 followers on Instagram and 15,000 followers on Twitter, on top of her tens of thousands of Facebook fans.
“I always hope that each and every piece of my work reaches someone who values the encounter with the stone, just as I appreciate my encounter with that particular stone,” Nakata says. She suspects that her social media fan base has grown because her audience “feels empathy” for the connection she feels with the animal, the stone, and the earth from which it emerged.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
