Evening

Dated 1907, this color woodcut titled "Evening" captures the transitional hour when daylight recedes and lamplight or moonlight takes over. Lum made this print during her early period of active woodblock production, just a few years after her initial training in Japan. The evening setting requires careful management of dark tones — a technical challenge in water-based woodblock printing, where deep values are built through multiple passes rather than a single heavy application of ink. Lum handles this by layering transparent washes of color, allowing the paper to breathe through even in shadow areas. The result evokes twilight rather than full darkness, that liminal interval rich with possibility that has long attracted printmakers and painters working in the Japanese tradition.