Artwork Details
Medium: Digital drawing (Photoshop)
Subject: A woman wearing blue jewelry, waiting
Theme: The anxiety of waiting, emotional vulnerability, passage of time
Artist: Visual Story Artist Kazue Shima
The Story
I want, more than anything, to be free of you. And yet I wait.
I still remember the day you put this blue jewelry on me. That morning the street outside was loud, and I couldn’t settle into the waiting — I opened the front door, stepped out, stood there for a moment. A group of girls ran past talking over each other. Then a couple, looking unreasonably happy. I noticed her hair: long, chestnut brown. I envied it a little.
I looked up at the sky. The lamp in the east corridor had burned out — I’d meant to do something about that. The man at the corner shop had gone to see his grandchildren two days ago; he was probably still away. And I didn’t feel like yellow flowers for the table. I should go find another color.
Standing there, eyes dropped to the pavement, I felt it come over me — something small and miserable. Sad, for no clear reason.
I gave up on the flowers. I didn’t trust myself to choose the right ones in this mood. Better to go back inside, make tea, watch the street from the window.
While I was drinking it, the girl next door started playing piano. The same piece as always. Last week she stumbled every time at the third measure. Today she played straight through. She must have practiced.
I thought about the violin I’d left at my mother’s. I couldn’t play it cleanly now, not anymore. I used to have a piece I always stumbled over too — my teacher would get frustrated with me at every lesson. I can’t remember the title. Something beautiful, with a part that ached a little. Not unlike what she’s playing now.
In another month she’ll have it. Measure by measure, each one held until it holds, and then the whole thing will be there.
I wonder if that’s how it works with us. If enough days accumulate, will the moments of hesitation thin out? Will I eventually move through this the way a pianist moves through a piece she’s known for years — as if she never didn’t know it?
If that happened, would I be the woman you deserve? And would that woman still be me?
I put down the cup. Turned the lights low. And put the blue jewelry on, and waited for you again.
Materiality & Context
This work is a digital drawing made in Photoshop. The brushes were sourced externally for the POP series, referencing the texture of a crayon — a PILOT product that has been discontinued.
The blue-grey ground, the soft outline of the pink body, the rough shadow of the black clothing: each is built from layered digital brushwork that carries the tactile quality of that analog material.
The blue jewelry is not decorative detail. It is the origin point of the narrative: the day it was given is where the story begins, and where it returns. She moves through time in a version of herself that is not quite her own — caught between what she feels and what she performs. What keeps her grounded is the physical fact of the jewelry in her hands.
As the pace of the world accelerates, the felt sense of time grows harder to hold. The question in this work is what a person reaches for when that happens.
She knows that objects alone cannot fill what she is missing. And yet the only thing she can trust right now is this blue jewelry — something that carries the weight of a feeling too deep to name.
My POP series draws on my experience as a runway model in the 1980s. Clothing and accessories in my work are not styling choices — they are carriers of memory, relationship, and time. This piece is one expression of that approach.
