Hiroya Kurata

A lot of artists have big dreams. Hiroya Kurata is one of them. But his big dreams revolve around the quiet joys of daily life, not the fading glamour of 'success.' "I feel like it's emotionally easier for me to paint now after telling myself: paint what I can now at this age." You can feel how liberating this approach is when you look at his work. His style is fun, loose and illustrative, a bit like the pages of a children's book. Kurata usually paints photographs he's taken of himself, his wife and three children. They hang out in places you recognise. A kitchen table, a river, a tennis court. The paintings ooze with the wholesomeness of a good family day out. But like any family, the paintings are subtly weird, too. "I draw the scenery in a detailed way," he explains. "But the faces are manga-ish, which is why there's a glaring contrast."

In 2023, Kurata became a full-time artist. Before that, he worked many jobs, as well as being an art restorer for 15 years. "When I started working with expensive artworks worth millions, I would get clammy hands because I felt overwhelmed by their value," he says. "At some point, I became able to treat each painting as one piece of work. Once I found out that, in some cases, there's a big gap between a painting's quality and marketplace value." So after that, Kurata stopped believing that any kind of art is better than another. He thinks a 3-million-pound painting is the same as a quick sketch in a journal. The value is not the price, but what you bring to it. Kurata is an artist truly painting for himself, not for clout. And having a little window into his life through his painting is a small and wonderful privilege.