Hello !

The site was launched a month ago. I’ve started circulating the link to potential customers and I’m wisely waiting for replies. In the meantime, I’m continuing to paint, most recently with this portrait.

This is Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido. He is the great master of our martial art, known as O-Sensei (sensei meaning master).

Morihei Ueshiba lived between 1883 and 1969 and created aikido, an art of peace, in the 1940s, after spending the first half of his life teaching techniques related to the art of war. I think I’ll tell you more about aikido in a future article.

For this illustration, I searched long and hard for a photo of O-Sensei that I liked and that was of good enough quality for me to paint a sufficiently accurate portrait. There are many photos of Ueshiba, but they are old and often slightly blurred. This makes it difficult for me to paint the eyes, which are often just shadows.

In addition, his gaze is rarely on the lens, so for this portrait I wanted to depict O-Sensei looking straight at his observer. I wanted this portrait to be used by an aikido practitioner, who would have the feeling that O-Sensei was looking at him attentively.

In many dojos, there’s a small altar positioned against a wall facing the tatami. This altar is called the kamidana. The kamidana contains various objects symbolic of the Shinto religion, which are used to greet the kami and thank them for their blessings. Kamis are spirits (of nature, ancestors, deities). Over time, portraits of the founders of the martial arts have found a place among these kamis (Morihei Ueshiba is said to have said he did not wish to be worshipped as a kami, but this was during his lifetime). In dojos where there is no kamidana, as is often the case in France, a simple portrait hangs on the wall. We greet him at the beginning and end of each class.

It was with this in mind that I painted this portrait. Indeed, in most dojos, O Sensei’s portraits show him looking off to one side. For my part, I wanted him to look at the practitioner during his study, so that the latter could feel his presence through this gaze.

I did my best to translate this presence. But it’s always very difficult to give a faithful representation of eyes, which, beyond their outward appearance, convey a form of emotion and sensation. It’s often through the eyes that you sense someone’s personality and state of mind. Good portraitists manage to put soul into their paintings, notably through their eyes.

In this case, I didn’t know the color of O Sensei’s eyes, which made my task more difficult. As I painted, thinking of all the wisdom accumulated behind those irises, I worried that I might have done a look too tired by the weight of years. I hope that aikido practitioners will find in it all the benevolence and rigour that O Sensei must surely have shown in accompanying them in their practice.

I took great pleasure in painting this illustration, and thought that the martial arts theme perhaps deserved a more prominent place on my site. So you’ll find a martial arts and Japan category on my Portfolio.

Don’t hesitate to let me know what you think, and follow me on insta ou pinterest to be alerted of my next illustrations.

See you soon!