Monument Moonrise

Monument Moonrise is an etching rather than a mokuhanga, and the title points away from rural Japan toward the American Southwest—almost certainly Monument Valley on the Arizona–Utah border, with its sandstone buttes and mesas. Williams, born to American missionary parents in Peru and trained at UC Santa Barbara before settling in Japan in 1972, has periodically returned to American subjects across his career, and the Southwest's geological monumentality offers a counterpart to the cultivated satoyama landscapes of his Kyoto work. Etching suits the subject: the bitten line on a copper plate can carry the stratified rock faces, the sharp shadows cast by raking light, and the rising moon disc with a precision different from the soft tonal gradients of mokuhanga. The print belongs to the smaller body of intaglio work in his output and demonstrates his willingness to match medium to subject—washi and woodblock for the humid, vegetal landscapes of Japan, copper plate and acid for the dry, mineral landscapes of the American West.