Chizuru Morii Kaplan 

b. 1954

Chizuru Morii Kaplan is a Japanese-born painter who currently resides in New York City. Her watercolors exhibit her architectural background, as she masterfully notices, and renders, everything from the sweeping skylines to the personal details of architecture often overlooked by the untrained eye. She takes a foreign place to the viewer and provides them with a gateway to making this far-off city their own. Through Morii Kaplan's lens, the viewer is not only transported to a location but is given a sense of what feels like to be there. One understands what it's like to walk down Venice's streets or sit on a Parisian rooftop. Through abstract brushstrokes she captures a more truthful depiction of the building, the work is maticulous and more detailed for her style.

After working as a freelance architectural renderer in Tokyo, Chicago, and New York, in 2007, she decided to study watercolor with Paul Ching-Bor at the Art Student League of New York. She subsequently won a fellowship from the League for study at the Paris American Academy. Her paintings have been exhibited in New York City at The National Arts Club Gallery, the Salmagundi Club, the Bertrand Delacroix Gallery, and the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, MO.