Alan Lau | walks along the kamogawa: the kyoto series - part 1 

Crossing the Kamogawa, this old man in a baseball cap pushes a battered stroller. Inside, poking out, I see the crooked ears of a chubby rabbit. 

As children, we long for that safe place. That room where one can feel secure enough to be oneself and experiment and explore without judgement. And even as adults, the child in us yearns for that place.

In the last few years, I've found such a space in the upstairs utility room of my wife's hundred-year-old house in a quiet neighborhood of Kyoto. One takes the dark wood stairs one step at a time past the old adobe wall bulging out almost out of fatigue, once nothing more than mud slathered over a lattice framework of bamboo slats. Upstairs, there is nothing remarkable about this worn six tatami (straw mats used as flooring in a traditional Japanese house) mat room with a tokunoma (a recessed space used to display art in a traditional Japanese house) and a sliding wood door that hides a storage area to hold the futons (cushioned folded bedding). 

The adobe walls are covered with a white wash now crumbling away in flakes and splotched with smudges of Sumi ink from my painting. We hang our laundry here on lines both inside the room and past the sliding windows that open up outside to a long upper deck. Out of the ordinariness of these surroundings, what's most precious is the natural light that streams through. With the advent of newer high rises that pepper this street of older traditional houses, a lot of that light is blocked out. This then, is the only room that gets the sunlight. It is here I carpet the tatami with a thin wool blanket and sheets of newspaper to absorb the mess I make as I paint until all ideas are exhausted.