Harumi Hironaka is a Peruvian-Japanese painter and illustrator currently living and working in Sao Paulo. She lived her teenage years in Japan, where she was influenced by Anime and Manga: ¨that’s how it all started. I wanted to become a manga artist¨.

Despite her dream, she studied languages and became a professional translator and interpreter and started her carrer working as a freelance. ¨I worked at home and spent most of the time sitting in front of my laptop, it was terribly boring. Every time I took a break I started drawing. So that’s when it hit me: I wanted to add color to my little drawings.

She learned how to paint using oils by watching tutorials on Youtube and reading tips on the Internet, and that same year she had her first collective exhibition at Ryoichi Jinnai Art Gallery. ¨I was overwhelmed and freaked out, I would have never expected something like that.¨ Harumi is now more focused on her illustrations and sells prints of them on her online store.

Artist Statement:
Let me tell you a secret. Because if there is a way I like to express myself is through secrets and symbols. That girl you see in my pictures, or the ones you believe to see repetedly on my drawings, none of them are me. My world, the one I truly live in, is inside me; and yes, its colors are very much like the ones you see on my paintings. I’m afraid of the crowd. I don’t need its repetitive noises.

I appreciate silence and I’m adicted to my solitude. It’s from there that I briefly escape to the freedom of the girls on my paintings, it moves me like them and I dive into their dense atmospheres, their underwater universes, their dark caves.  Crisis and emotions excite me. They awaken me and get me started immediately and recklessly. Nothing energizes me more than being at the edge of the cliff, looking into the abyss, feeling the unesiness and the vertigo. These urgent situations make me translate my anger, my pain, my fantasies… into color. I never thought that my work would be seen by so many people.

I never imagined that, while looking into the depths of my girls eyes, I would find a familiar space. They are not only naked girls, they are mood states… they are a personality disorder. There’s something that vibrates in each of them, something that’s wrong. None of them are perfect, and that’s why, even when they are playing a character, they are more real than many people out there.