Michio Yoshihara made many works using sand and gravel in his early years. In an outdoor exhibition, he exhibited a light bulb in sand, and in his paintings, he painted coal tar on canvas and covered it with sand and gravel, showing that this was not just a passing fancy.
Later, Italian artists such as Bury and Jean de Buffet would use soil and other materials on canvas, and in the 1970s, artworks were created that incorporated nature in different forms. Michio’s work was a pioneering experiment and that can also be said to be an attempt to create works of art in an automatic manner.
Michio Yoshihara's paintings later took a new turn with variations of stripes with several colors running in parallel. The works of Gutai artists do not start from the idea of reproducing a scene on a flat surface, but rather from the idea of expressing the material itself. This is connected to the idea of Kandinsky, one of the founders of abstract painting, to paint what can be expressed only with color and line, which foreshadows the minimal and cool style of early Frank Stella, who further developed pure abstraction. At the same time, it is a work filled with many flavors that evoke a cosmic sensation.