M’onma

b. 1951 · Hokkaido, Japan

He says his body glows and he cannot see while he draws. What came back from the trance took forty years to be shown to anyone.

The life

M’onma was born in 1951 on Hokkaido and began as a conventional, representational artist. In his twenties, he describes a divine presence entering his studio and guiding his hand; he came round to find a drawing unlike anything he had ever made. He quit his job, returned to Hokkaido and drew in the mountains for some twenty years until, he says, the spirit reinhabited him. After four decades of private work he emerged onto the international scene, with solo exhibitions at Cavin-Morris Gallery in New York and art brut exhibitions in Japan, Switzerland and France.

The work

Coloured pencil, ink, pastel and graphite on paper: densely cross-hatched, melting visions in which clowns, Buddhas and animal hybrids surface and dissolve, with Shinto and Christian symbols emptied of their usual meanings. The creatures are distorted but never grotesque, as if reported from another realm rather than imagined in this one.

Why we love them

Forty years of practice with no audience, no market and, by his account, no eyesight during the act. Trust the transmission.

Go deeper

• M'onma at the Outsider Art Fair
• Cavin-Morris Gallery
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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