Hanase Winter (2)

Hanase is a mountain hamlet in the Kitayama range north of Kyoto, a region of cedar forests, terraced fields, and heavy winter snowfall that lies near Williams's adopted home. The (2) designates this as a second composition in a series, indicating Williams's habit of returning to the same village across seasons and years to register incremental change. Winter prints in his mokuhanga output rely heavily on the unprinted white of the washi itself to suggest snow on roofs, branches, and field-margins, with carefully registered key blocks supplying the dark accents of bare trees, stone walls, or roof beams. The restrained palette—often little more than indigo, gray, and the warm tone of the paper—rewards close looking. Williams's Hanase prints function as a sustained record of a depopulating mountain settlement; thatched roofs, kominka farmhouses, and the surrounding satoyama landscape have all been disappearing across his five decades in the area, and these prints constitute a deliberate visual archive.