Encouraged by a Japanese father, he himself a designer, Simone Tanaka was able to develop her skills at academic-based schools which provided her a solid foundation to master drawing.
The inerasable watercolor forges the discipline and attentiveness required by millenary techniques. Coherent with her own trajectory, the encounter with painting is unavoidable. Considering the formal rigor in terms of color, texture and composition, her painting might be considered traditional. But, in essence, her painting sets imagination free, is intuitive and leads neither to the pre-conceived nor to what is real. It is also open to feelings, interpretations and emotions. To the eyes of each spectator it offers a different selection of what he/she expects to see in the painting. Somehow, each painting becomes a unique and individual experience.
The Eastern part of her family has become somewhat dispersed. Perhaps this was the starting point of her search: the reason for her identity, her affinity with the Japanese-Brazilian artists Flavio Shiro, Tomie Ohtake, Manabu Mabe, and others. A lyric abstraction, laden with the color of the real atmosphere that surrounds her. And there is sun in her color! There is tension as well. Her twighligh reds and emotive greens, her blues – tender and cuddling at times, grim and nearly silent at others – and the overlapping transparencies, all of them unaffectedly display her intimacy with the subject of her painting and her accessories – acrylic paint, brushes, canvas. Between the gesture and the graphism of her Eastern heritage, Simone chooses both. Her nimble brushstrokes may halt on petty details when – she says joking – “the Tanaka half takes over”.
João Henrique Amaral