Brutal Oldster is a series of graphite drawings made on the threshold of my fiftieth birthday. Drawn with an ordinary pencil on leftover scraps of paper, the works were created specifically for an exhibition at the Iru Nursing Home in Tallinn.

The project began not with Japan, or even with architecture, but with the exhibition venue itself. It caused me to reflect on time, endurance, and spaces that carry old age with subtle dignity. Old Japanese architecture became an almost inevitable language for expressing those thoughts. Its aged and weathered timber, worn joinery, and gently settled roofs do not conceal age—they reveal it.

Japan is not an imagined place for me. My wife is Japanese, and for nearly twenty years I have returned to Tokyo almost every year. Over time, its streets, buildings, and atmosphere have quietly become part of my visual memory. These drawings, however, do not depict real places. They are improvised recollections—less about Japan itself than about the mental landscape we call "Japan": a place of order, silence, weathering, and time.

The title, Brutal Oldster, comes from the Estonian slang expression jõhker vana. Despite its literal meaning, it is a term of admiration, used for someone who has achieved something remarkably difficult or masterful. In that sense, the title is both self-ironic and affectionate—a compliment that could apply equally to these ageing wooden buildings and, perhaps, to their author.

These drawings are not about Japan.

They are about time.