Imoto Tekiho

Imoto Tekiho (井元荻浦) was born in Oita in 1909 and remains a minor, little-documented figure in the history of Japanese printmaking. In Kyoto he studied Nanga (literati) style landscape painting under Domoto Insho, one of the leading nihonga masters of the era, and during the 1930s he produced designs for the print publisher Doi, whose seal appears in the margins of his sheets. His death date is not recorded.

His prints are sumi-e style landscapes — ink-wash compositions that emphasize spontaneous brushwork and tonal gradation over the bright polychrome palette of much shin-hanga. Typical subjects include weathered pines, bamboo, boats on quiet water, and mountains in soft gray silhouette, worked in gradations of gray and black that preserve the look of a brush-and-ink painting. The traditional ink-painting sensibility Imoto absorbed in his Nanga training carries directly into these woodblock designs.

A rarely seen artist whose surviving output is small, Imoto occupies a quiet margin of the modern Japanese print tradition, known today chiefly through the serene, ink-toned landscapes he made for the Doi workshop.