Naohisa Inoue

Naohisa Inoue was born in 1948 in Osaka. He graduated from the Kanazawa College of Art in 1971, and from 1973 to 1992 was a graphic designer and high school fine art teacher. He has been a free-lance artist since 1993, and is presently a Professor of Art and Design at Seian University. On the occasion of his first Tokyo-area exhibition in 1994 (paintings from The Natural History of Iblard, at the Pinpoint Gallery in Minami Aoyama), Inoue - by then a big fan of Hayao Miyazaki's films - invited Miyazaki to attend, not expecting that the renowned director would actually show up. But Miyazaki did show up, and was impressed enough to not only buy a painting (Upward Draft, now hanging in the sta