昔話と。出来れば忘れたい母の言葉【告知あり】

それでは、ここからは少し趣向を変えまして、私、前田敏幸についてご紹介させていただきます。

1990年に大阪府八尾市で、6人家族の次男として生まれました。
(ちなみに八尾市は、私が子供の頃はひったくり率が全国でワーストワンだったそうで、
当時としては治安があまり良くない環境だったようです。)

兄弟は全員男ですが、喧嘩も特になく平和でした。
両親は18、19歳頃に兄を授かり、その流れで私が生まれました。
19歳で高校を卒業してすぐに子育てが始まったと考えると、
自身が親になった今、本当に苦労が多かっただろうと改めて感じます。

自分はこういう風に作家活動をしていますが、
両親は別にそういった経歴を持っている人たちではありません。
父親はステンレスの加工を扱う会社で働いており、母親は専業主婦です。
母は手先が器用で、学生時代には美大への進学を希望していたようですが、
祖父の強い反対により断念したと聞いています。

そうした背景もあり、両親は私たち子供たちに自由に生きるようにと育ててくれました。
俗に言う放任主義です。幼少期の自分は外で勝手に走り出してどこかに行ってしまってたらしく、その度胃に肝を冷やしたと聞いています。

高校までの学費は親が持ってくれましたが、
大学進学については『行きたいなら自分で稼ぎなさい』という方針でしたので、私自身、

芸術に興味がある訳でもなく今社会人になってもつまんなさそうだなという漠然としたイメージで就職を拒否し学生時代にアルバイトをして学費を貯め、無事入学することができました。
(高校・大学でのエピソードはまたの機会に)

実家の家を出ると周りには少し先に山々が見えるような、片田舎で育ちました。今はもうありませんが、近くには草木が生い茂った広場があり、虫かごや虫網を持って虫取りに行ったり、近くドブ川で魚を捕まえようとして見事に溺れたりもしました。今では珍しい井戸水のポンプがあり、それが楽しくて飽きずに何度も操作していたのを覚えています。

そのような幼少期を過ごし、概ね平和に生活していたと思います。

ただ、幼稚園を卒園する前か、小学校に上がる頃だったか、
健康診断で心臓に病気があることがわかりました。

病名はWPW症候群という少し珍しいもので、
治療費や診断費用は国の補助があったと記憶しています。

幼い私に母が
『あなたは心臓に病気があって、いつどうなるかわからないから気をつけなさい』と言った一言で、

私の人生は大きく変わってしまいました。
何をするにも常に死というものが頭をよぎるようになり、死を恐れるあまり、子供らしからぬ冷めた子供になってしまったのです。死生観をテーマに作品制作をしていましたが、どこかで自分は死なないという、今思えば不思議な思い込みを抱えたまま生きてきました。

しかし、コロナ禍で祖父や会社の同僚を亡くしたことをきっかけに、初めて『死』というものを現実として捉え、真剣に向き合い始めたのは30歳を過ぎてからのことでした。そこからくまというモチーフが私の作品に登場するようになったのですが、この話はまた別の機会にお話できればと思っています。

自分が母親の一言で人生に大きな影響を与えられた事を考えると、
娘に投げかける言葉も本当に気をつけねばと思う今日この頃です。

それでは。また。良い1日を。

Hello everyone, this is Toshiyuki Maeda.

Thank you very much for always reading my newsletter. This is the second installment.

First, I have an announcement.

I will be participating in two exhibitions held in Tokyo this June. At each exhibition, I plan to show about five works in total, sized 60x60cm and 80x80cm. While I believe they will likely be available for purchase online, I would be very grateful if you could see the pieces in person and choose the one you like.

The style of these works is a further upgraded version of the flower-themed pieces that I first presented at my previous solo exhibition. Personally, I think they've turned out quite interesting. I have high hopes for this series and anticipate it will develop in various ways in the future. Detailed dates and locations will be announced in future newsletters and on my social media.

Now, for a bit of a change of pace, I'd like to introduce myself, Toshiyuki Maeda.

I was born in 1990 in Yao City, Osaka Prefecture, as the second son in a family of six. (By the way, I heard that Yao City had the worst snatch-and-grab crime rate in the country when I was a child, so it seems it wasn't a very safe environment back then.)

All my siblings are male, but we were quite peaceful and didn't fight much. My parents had my older brother when they were around 18 or 19, and I followed soon after. Considering they started raising children right after graduating high school at 19, now that I'm a parent myself, I truly realize how much hardship they must have gone through.

While I'm pursuing a career as an artist, my parents don't have any artistic backgrounds. My father works at a company that handles stainless steel processing, and my mother is a homemaker.

My mother was apparently very skilled with her hands and wanted to go to art university when she was a student, but she had to give up due to strong opposition from my grandfather. Perhaps because of this, my parents raised us children to live freely. It was what you might call a laissez-faire approach. I heard that when I was little, I would often run off and go somewhere on my own, which always worried them sick.

My parents covered my tuition up to high school, but their policy for university was, "If you want to go, earn the money yourself." So, I wasn't particularly interested in art, and I had a vague feeling that working a regular job would be boring. I refused to get a job right after high school, worked part-time to save up for tuition, and was able to enroll in university without any issues. (I'll share some episodes from my high school and university days another time.)

Getting back to the family, there are four of us brothers, and as what you might call the "older brother's boy," I always looked up to my older brother. I remember him always helping me when I was bullied as a child. I also played with my two younger brothers, but I'm ashamed to say I don't have many clear memories with them and feel like we don't have many shared experiences. (To begin with, I barely remember my own family's names and birthdays, which really freaks out my wife.)

I grew up in a somewhat rural area where you could see the mountains a little ways off when you left our house. There used to be a field overgrown with plants nearby (it's gone now), where I would go to catch bugs with my insect cage and net. I also vividly remember falling into a nearby open sewer while trying to catch fish and completely drowning myself. There was a well with a pump, which was so much fun that I would operate it endlessly without getting bored. I spent my childhood like that, living a generally peaceful life. However, around the time I was finishing kindergarten or entering elementary school, a health check revealed that I had a heart condition.

The diagnosis was Wolff-Parkinson-White (WPW) syndrome, a somewhat rare condition. I recall that treatment and diagnostic costs were subsidized by the government. My mother's words to my young self, "You have a heart condition, and you never know what might happen, so be careful," drastically changed my life. The thought of death constantly lingered in my mind no matter what I did, and out of fear of death, I became an unusually jaded child. While I have been creating artwork with the theme of life and death, somewhere along the line, I lived with a strange conviction that I myself would not die. However, it wasn't until my grandfather and a colleague at work passed away during the COVID-19 pandemic that I truly confronted and began to seriously think about "death" as a reality, and this was after I turned 30. It was around that time that the bear motif started appearing in my work, but I'd like to talk about that in more detail another time.

Considering how much my mother's words impacted my life, I feel I must be extremely careful about the words I use with my own daughter these days.

Well then. See you again. Have a wonderful day.

"This has been posted using an automatic translation function."