Naoto Hattori is a Japanese artist who paints small fluffy animals in surreal style, giving them huge eyes to turn them into unnatural hybrids. His subjects typically have round heads and oversized eyes, and he often makes hybrids by turning two animals into one.
His paintings are small and usually range from 85 to 92” without a frame. “When I closed my eyes, I could see a colorful eye like a mandala and it kept changing shape like a kaleidoscope. I drew hundreds of the eye images. Back then, I was thinking that it was something everyone could see,” he told This Is Colossal.
When he got older, he earned a BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts. The surreal paintings he creates are in his unique style. As he says, he likes painting concepts that can’t be exactly expressed in words, like emotions and feelings. That’s why, without him intending to, his works end up being surreal.
You can see the paintings below and more of them on his Instagram.
