Fumiko Amano “Live Series (2004) 001″

Fumiko Amano was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1968.  She has been exploring various mediums to express herself since she was a child.  She started taking piano lessons at three, and she was composing music by seven.  By the age of ten, Amano published her first poetry book with her own ink drawings.  In 1987, she attended Toyo Women’s College in Tokyo as an English literature major and joined a theater club in school. At that time she was fascinated by contemporary theater directed by Yukio Ninagawa and Juro Kara (the most influential Japanese theater directors). This led Amano to move to the United States to study more about contemporary theater arts.

Amano attended the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, where she studied visual art, music recording, theater arts and performing arts for four and a half years. At age 23 she gave her first performance art piece, using a big mixed media painting (7’ x 35’) which was used as a musical score.  She graduated from UWSP in 1993 with a BA in Art & Design-Painting/Printmaking. Soon after, she moved to San Francisco, where she started incorporating beat poetry, architecture, Japanese comics, dreams and sound into her paintings. In 1997, in search of a new environment to create sonic landscapes, Amano traveled extensively, first to Rio de Janeiro, then on to New York, Miami and Los Angeles, where she finally settled down.

Over the past seven years Amano has been working on several series of paintings, including: Dream Series (2002-current), Dust Painting Series (2003), Water Music Series (2003), Live Painting Series (2003-current), Organic Series (2003-current), Downtown Series (2004-current), Pattern Series (2005), Atmospherics Series (2006), and Flower Form Series (2006-current).  Her atmospheric paintings, created as visualizations of sound/dream/organic forms, have been exhibited in San Francisco, New York, L.A., Berlin, London, Spain and Korea.  Her recent works were exhibited at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Lawrence Asher Gallery, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Rental and Sales Gallery, Another Year in LA, Gallery Revisited, Claremont Museum of Art and Murnau Art Gallery in Seville, Spain.