By Regina Sienra on May 27, 2024

“I leave it to the movement of my hands, letting my heart and soul hit the canvas at that moment.”

Most drawings you see as finished pieces have a lot of planning behind them. Before adding color and details, many draw a preliminary sketch. This offers creatives structure and works as a foundational layer for the piece. But for a Japan-based artist known as Sanagi, this limits the creative possibilities of the work. Instead, he ditches these general guides in favor of portraying whatever crosses his mind at the time of creation.

“I can’t imagine how it will turn out because I leave it to the movement of my hands, letting my heart and soul hit the canvas at that moment,” Sanagi writes. “Therefore, each time, I run my pen through a mixture of anticipation and anxiety. I would be happy if you could feel the excitement of looking through a microscope into a small piece of paper.”

This spontaneity doesn’t lessen the quality of his work. On the contrary, Sanagi’s expansive imagination makes way for detailed, oneiric compositions. Working with pen and paint on paper, Sanagi explores the depths of his brain. “In order to express ‘something complicated’ parasitic in my brain, I drew elaborately with fine lines and dots using a ballpoint pen to create shadows,” he explains about one of his most recent drawings, Brain parasitism. “I expressed my feelings, which repeatedly bubble up and burst like ‘bubbles’ every minute and second, by freely pouring my soul into the dots and lines.”[…]

But spontaneity doesn’t lessen the quality of his work. On the contrary, his expansive imagination makes way for detailed, oneiric compositions.

More: Artist’s Incredible Spontaneous Drawings Capture the Feeling of the Moment