Chizuru Morii Kaplan

Japanese-born Chizuru Morii Kaplan is a painter who now resides in New York City. For two and a half decades, after studying architectural and interior design in Tokyo, she worked as a freelance architectural renderer in Tokyo, Chicago, and New York for such renowned clients as I.M. Pei, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Junzo Sakakura Assoc., and Anotonio Raymond Assoc.

In 2007, Morii Kaplan studied watercolor with Paul Ching-Bor at the Art Student League of New York, and she subsequently won a fellowship from the League for study at the Paris American Academy. Morii Kaplan has won numerous awards and her paintings have been exhibited in New York City at The National Arts Club Gallery, the Salmagundi Club, the Bertrand Delacroix Gallery, as well as at the Springfield Art Museum in Springfield, MO. 

Her work has been repeatedly featured in SPLASH, The Best of Watercolor, and in The Artist's Magazine. In the October 2014 issue of Watercolor Artist Magazine, the critic Sarah A. Strickley wrote that, “painting from dark to light with a nary a hard edge in sight, Chizuru Morii Kaplan breaks with tradition to bring out the best qualities of watercolor in her surprisingly detailed architectural paintings."