You may feel a gentle stillness—of a place you have never been, yet somehow remember.

Japanese artist kočka, known as The Painter of Skies, creates analog works on paper using oil pastels, devoted to landscapes where the sky opens wide.

His subjects include open plains and farmland seen from riverbanks, wetlands and natural parks, and views from rooftops or other elevated places. What unites these scenes is a sense of openness—a sky that stretches freely above the land. Among the many everyday landscapes that surround us, kočka is drawn to those where the sky is most present, and it is these places that become his works.

Before beginning a painting, kočka always visits the site in person. This is not only to observe what can be seen, but to fully experience the place through his own senses—the temperature, the air, the quality of sunlight, the movement of clouds, the wind, surrounding sounds, and the quiet presence of living things. What he feels there, and what those sensations stir within him, become essential elements of each work.

Kočka is called The Painter of Skies not simply because he paints the sky so often, but because long before he ever began to draw, he was deeply fascinated by it. He continues to observe, contemplate, and seek to understand the sky with unwavering curiosity.

Having gazed at the sky since childhood, kočka does not see it as a mere backdrop. For him, the sky always exists alongside time itself. The sky he saw as a child, the sky of today, the sky of ten years ago, or a hundred years ago—each holds a quiet narrative of time.

To paint the sky is to paint time.

Perhaps this is why kočka’s works gently awaken a sense of memory and nostalgia: the skies he has been looking at for so long seem to intersect with the passage of time we each carry within ourselves.