"Blueberry", Copyright © 2022 Makoto Fujimura, Mineral Pigments on Belgium Linen, 64 x 80 in. Shown here at the 2023 Pola Museum exhibit in Japan.
The "Blueberry" series paintings began during the COVID Pandemic; they are meditations into luminosity in darkness. I had also been preparing to write the "afterword" for Mark Rothko's The Artist's Reality (Yale University Press), and I was immersed in Rothko's writings. My pigment shop owner sent me a sample of a rare mixture of azurite (usually discarded minerals, as the dynamite used in copper mining will char many of the azurite and malachite), and I decided to paint works that have the pure pigments only on Belgium portrait linen.