In his oil paintings of Alaskan mountain ranges, Japanese artist Tohru Aizawa creates tension between realism and abstraction, giving his works a dream-like quality. He paints mountains with a stylized realism that conveys the Alaskan landscape’s theatricality, imbuing it with mythic and eternal grandeur. Furthermore, in many of Aizawa’s paintings these mountain ranges are surrounded by arrangements of abstract lines and shapes.

These regions often suggest stormy skies and windswept snow plains, and are executed in the same tone and hue as the mountain ranges. However, they easily give themselves over to abstraction, creating rhythm and guiding the eye over the canvas. In doing so, these abstract areas in Aizawa’s paintings bolster the mythic import of the Alaskan scenery he depicts so compellingly. He paints immense mountains that seem to be weightless, floating in a timeless abstract plane, isolated from their surrounding landscapes. By depicting these massive subjects so as to render them weightless, Aizawa demonstrates the transformative capacities of the intelligent artist.