Solstice

Solstice captures the extreme light of either the longest or shortest day of the year, a recurring preoccupation in Williams's mokuhanga of the Kyoto countryside. Williams typically renders such moments through deep [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradients across the sky, the carved blocks pulled by hand on [washi](/glossary/washi) to produce the soft tonal transitions that distinguish his work from offset reproduction. The composition would likely set rice paddies, a treeline, or the silhouette of a thatched farmhouse against a low, raking sun. Since settling in a 200-year-old farmhouse outside Kyoto in 1975, Williams has documented the seasonal extremes of Hanase and the surrounding Kitayama foothills with the same patient observation he brings to his oil paintings. The print belongs to a broader body of work concerned with the calendrical rhythms of rural Japan—solstices, equinoxes, the agricultural year—rendered without nostalgia but with quiet specificity. Multiple blocks would have been required to layer the saturated color fields against the more delicately printed foreground details.