A distinguished senior printmaker, Amano has been creating his elegant, optically illusory systematic arrangements since the I950s. Educated at Aomori Prefectural Technical High School, but with no subsequent formal art education due to the turbulence of the post-war years, Amano now lives in Kanagawa. Through his concerns with technique and the qualities of wood, he has consistently produced abstract images of great technical perfection distinguished by his characteristic palette of green and red.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Amano has persisted with abstraction since the I950s and I960s, further refining and extending his images. Today his prints evoke a dreamlike world in which enigmatic spaces and subtle variations of form combine with free-floating ribbons of colour in a disembodied space of exceptional clarity and quietude.

Amano's series' titles, which incorporate words such as dream, memory and hallucination, reiterate his concern with the intangible.

Jackie Menzies, Contemporary Japanese Prints: The Urban Bonsai, 1992, p. 21 & 24.