About:

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Skoropadenko started sketch and paint sakura at night because of a unique light condition of a night.

To paint sakura in bright spring time daytime doesn’t do the delicate flowers justice. But at night when the admiring crowds have gone, after a midnight when the last train left the station, Tokyo becomes calm and empty.

 

Then only the faint light somewhere inside the sakura lights up the darkness and the strange shadows cast by the hundred years old cherry trees.

 

Skoropadenko is using the night for ‘plein-air’ painting to capture the ephemeral beauty of the Sakura. 

 

Painting in low light, is following in the footsteps of all greats: Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Toulouse-Lautrec. They had no bright artificial light to paint by. Their studios had no huge windows to let the light of the day in. To experience their art to the fullest, to see its luminosity, you need the subdued light of a pre-electric powered world.

 

Skoropadenko uses black paper, Japanese oil pastel and Japanese ink for her creations. As she works she can hardly see the results in the gloom, she has to feel, almost smell the pastel and ink on the paper.

 

The night extracts from her a unique color palette, the picture opens to vibrancy like a Sakura flower when struck by the warm light of the sun.

 

The Sakura season is still in bloom in . Skoropadenko is going to do her night sessions until the rain washes away the pink flowers for another year.