While many artists can recreate and repurpose the world around them, not many can maintain or even elevate the enchantment of life itself. To do so requires a boundless imagination and an immeasurable amount of talent. Not to mention a vivid understanding of composition, shape, color, and many other factors.
Hirō Isono was someone who possessed all of these traits.
Born in 1945 in Aichi Prefecture, Japan, Isono was a student in the Fine Arts department at Aichi University until he graduated in 1968. His career as a freelance artist began in 1970 when he started working for a corporate design studio as a painter and illustrator.
Though not much is known about the contents of his early professional portfolio, one thing was clear: Isono was deeply endowed with a fascination for the natural world.
Growing up in Japan was a bedrock of Isono’s appreciation of nature, and, in his adulthood, he became well-traveled in his home country. He was known to make frequent visits to several destinations within the Japanese archipelago, including the Yaeyama Islands, Yakushima Island, and the Aokigahara (“Sea of Trees”) Forest, which is situated near Mt. Fuji. His love of Japanese landscapes proved to be a valuable asset in his repertoire as an artist, though it limited his intake to forests, mountains, and coastlines which were starkly just that: Japanese.
He wanted— needed —to see more of the world; to satisfy his curiosity and enhance his artistic abilities. Venturing far beyond the reaches of Japan, Isono was fortunate enough to travel to the Amazon, the Solomon Islands, Kenya, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and many other heavily forested regions ripe with flora and fauna in many forms. During these travels he developed an even keener eye and deeper understanding of jungles and tropical climates.
His style was unmistakably his own, and he created works that earned him reverence compared to an elite group of other artists such as Eyvind Earle, Henri Rousseau, and Tomás Sánchez.
While Isono’s paintings often featured a signature color palette of blues and greens, he could highlight his pieces with warmer colors when necessary. He achieved this in several ways, whether it was a red hue lining the horizon at sunset, a canopy of blood-orange flowers or trees, golden moonlight enriching a midnight scene, or a fair share of animals in various colors and sizes.
Though less frequent, Isono occasionally wove fragments of architecture into his paintings as well. He incorporated futuristic-looking buildings that exist in perfect harmony with their surrounding environment; elements of what can be classified as “eco-cities.”
The varied compositions of Isono’s works, ranging from pure nature scenes to his more utopian eco-cityscapes, helped land him a gig with game developer Square (now Square Enix) to work on Seiken Densetsu (known as Mystic Quest in Europe, and Final Fantasy Adventure in North America), which debuted in 1991 on Game Boy. In 1993, he was one of the leading artists who worked on the second installment of the growing series: Secret of Mana, on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES). He produced concept art in a variety of forms and is credited with designing several of the game’s characters, monsters, environments, and in-game menu screens, while he also served a prominent role in more general art direction. His most iconic contribution, however, was creating the cover for the game itself, in which he superimposed some of the project’s main characters into his unique world of larger-than-life forestation.
Isono continued to lay his fingerprints on the series as the years went by, working closely with other artists and the development team at Square. He is credited for working on every game in the Mana series up until 2007, which included:
Seiken Densetsu (1991) - Game Boy
Secret of Mana (1993) - SNES
Trials of Mana (1995) - SNES
Legend of Mana (1999) - PlayStation
Sword of Mana (2003) - Game Boy Advance
Children of Mana (2006) - Nintendo DS
Friends of Mana (2006) - Mobile
Dawn of Mana (2006) - PlayStation 2
Heroes of Mana (2007) - Nintendo DS
Another realm in which Isono made his mark was that of album cover artwork. Before he began working with Square on video game sleeves, he was tapped by a few artists to create visual identities for their projects. From 1977 to 1984, Isono made his small yet impactful mark on the Japanese music scene, crafting album cover artwork for a few different acts. In ‘77 his striking style graced the cover of Hi-Fi Set’s most popular album Hi-Fi Blend Pt. 1.
After working with the iconic trio, consisting of Junko Yamamoto, Toshihiko Yamamoto, and Shigeru Okawa, he produced a vibrant cover for Isao Tomita and his album Daphnis Et Chloé (released in 1979). The album is sadly not available on Spotify, but is available on YouTube (for now). The piece was a melting pot for all things Isono, as it featured his signature color palette, plenty of flora, some fauna, and a pair of human beings who may or may not serve as the work’s Adam & Eve.
According to Discogs, he only worked on three album covers during his life, the final being a collection of works by talented guitarists Kazuhito Yamashita & Larry Coryell as they reimagined Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The artwork by Isono graced the vinyl sleeve of this intricate and delicately moving collaboration, which also stands as one of the most incredible live performances I have ever come across. It was recorded in 1984.
Those in the art, gaming, and music industries, as well as many others, were deeply saddened by Hirō Isono’s passing in May 2013, due to heart failure. He was 68 years old. His legacy and his work, however, will continue to catch our eyes and capture our hearts for many years to come. One can only hope that the paradise he resides in now, if you believe in such things, is anything like the ones he was able to depict on canvas.
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