Maya Makino aims to capture and preserve the experience of witnessing scenes from the past, resulting from an involuntary awareness of sensations and appearing momentarily before her eyes. Think of the quietness of the night, the sound of the rain, or the scent of a flower. These fragments trigger childhood memories, followed by an experience in which those memories flash rapidly and are volatile through our minds before they disappear instantly, just as the artist becomes aware of these sights and senses. One of the most essential aspects of Makino’s painterly practice is the intensity of color. She uses a single dye to achieve a range of indigo blue hues, working on wooden panels primed with a traditional gesso using gofun—also known as shell lime. By doing so, the Japanese artist can create subtle textures and reliefs on her surface before soaking the panel with an intense indigo dye. The indigo does not sit on top of the surface; it penetrates the support, in keeping with the way her thoughts penetrate her mind in pursuit of remembering, capturing, and preserving feelings or moments. For Makino, painting is not only a tour de force of a specific medium on a particular surface. She approaches it as a phenomenon emerging from deep within the support, as the color permeates the painting to transcend its material aspects.