Profile

Akiko was born and raised in the central area of Tokyo, Japan. Tokyo is one of the busiest city in

the world, and while Mount Fuji can be seen in the distance, the concrete of man-made skyscrapers dominates the landscape, and the sky is often hazy. On this gray canvas, colors only appear with the cars rushing in and out, on the shop signs and with the clothe that people wear. When she wasn't drawing, one of her favorite early childhood games was to make colored water. It was a bit of a challenge to find hidden plants and flowers between houses and buildings, to eventually mix them into beautiful colorful liquids. This may well be what triggered her to express these feelings in colorful paintings.

Over the course of her adolescence, her family moved several times, and visited foreign countries

like Hawaii and Venezuela: these visits opened her appetite for traveling and discovering new places! She moved back to Hawaii to study at the University of Hawaii (Hilo) and ended up living there for over a decade. Since then, she's had the chance to visit or live in the US (the New York State), Brazil, Canada and even Australia. Akiko eventually moved to France to settle in the beautiful city of Nice, where she's been living with her husband since 2013.

She started working with acrylic painting while living in New York. After returning to Hawaii, she

met and started learning from Andrea Razzauti, a Toscan painter and musician living in Hawaii. Meeting Andrea had a major impact on Akiko, that radically changed her technique. Akiko still strives to make good use of the treasure of technique and sensitivity Andrea brought her, to better express and vehiculate the rich and feeric world that inhabits her.

Hawaii is a place of raw nature filled with the powerful Mana of the Pacific Ocean, the fiery

volcanos and the lush tropical forests, often requiring strong, vivid colors to paint. With its long civilized history, Nice and its surroundings offer a very different environment, requiring a much more nuanced palette of colors. In Nice, Akiko gets to share her love for art with several other artists.

Her goal is to be able to work with and get inspired from others while allowing personalities express themselves. Her hope is that through the artwork presented here, you can get an idea of her inner world, necessarily inspired by the atmosphere of the beautiful places of the world she has visited.