Ari Oreyami

Ari Oreyami [俺免・枊, April 16th 1925 - December 28th 1980] was a Kantonese painter who specialised in oils and gouache. She is especially known for her distinctively colourful, bright paintings, which often featured beautiful fruits, flowers, butterflies, and other idealised images of nature. Oreyami greatly enjoyed painting from life, and would often attempt to capture street scenes in busy parts of her home city, Meikai, as a way to bring movement into her works. During the 1960s, Oreyami ventured into portrait painting, and through the following years amassed a collection of over 650 sketch portraits of strangers she had drawn in the street. She has claimed that people-watching is her greatest inspiration.
== Biography ==
Ari Oreyami was born into a relatively wealthy family in the city of Meikai in Shinkō Prefecture. Showing an artistic flair from a young age, her parents enrolled her in formal training when she was eight years old; this experience Oreyami found 'incredibly stifling' and 'disappointing and frustrating'. The strict rules and regulations of her classes encouraged her to draw more freely in her spare time, creating works that disobeyed the laws of colour and composition that she had been taught. In 1944, Oreyami enrolled at the Seihan University of Art and Design, where she studied for four years before graduating. She painted continuously and was extremely prolific. However, it was not until 1950, when Oreyami was 25 years old, that she was discovered by a local art dealer and asked if she would consider selling her pieces. 
Oreyami married fellow artist and impressionist Kenji Tsukosho in 1951; they had two children together. She did not stop painting until well into her 70s, when the deterioration of her body and onset of athritis made it much harder to work. After her death in 1980, a plaque was dedicated to Oreyami at Endan Park in Meikai, a public garden which she would often paint in.