About the Artist
Harumi Kano Torres is a watercolor and acrylic painter and a book illustrator. Born in Mexico, she has grown up in Texas, Mexico City, French Polynesia, British Columbia, and Georgia, USA due to her father’s work. She currently lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and studies art, creative writing, and French at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.
Harumi has displayed her paintings and designs at the “Work in Progress” show at the McEachern Art Center and published artwork and writing in the literary magazine The Dulcimer.
She enjoys reading fantasy and magical realism stories. She also likes to take pictures of the sky, crochet, cook with her family at home, and drink hot teas.
About Her Work
Harumi Kano Torres is an illustrator with a focus on colorful, brushstroke-heavy acrylic paintings, and digital, hand-drawn book covers with a fascination for contrast and light.
Her work consists of acrylic paintings depicting specific animals as a metaphor for human immigration and map-like watercolor paintings. In her impressionist acrylics and geometric watercolors, Harumi illustrates the hope we see in change through relocation. Made by tracing people’s journeys on a map, she depicts abstract watercolor structures of society’s movement around her to tell a story through geography. At the same time, her acrylics show the bold and colorful motion of these people’s stories, especially in monarch butterflies, whales, and cranes.
Harumi hopes viewers can take away a piece of hope from her paintings to familiarize them with diasporas as a natural part of humanity. As an aesthetic series of paintings, her vivid acrylics and clean watercolors tell immigrants’ stories through the perspective of an artist well-versed in the art of change.
