Jungle Bouquet

Jungle Bouquet is a kachō-e in spirit if not in lineage: a tropical flower-and-foliage subject treated as a flat, decorative arrangement of saturated colour shapes rather than a botanical study. Summers's relationship to the traditional bird-and-flower genre was oblique — he reached it through modernist abstraction rather than through Hokusai or Koitsu — but the formal devices align: high-key palette, frontal composition, suppression of cast shadow, and a strong reliance on silhouette. His back-printed woodcut technique, in which ink bleeds through the washi from blocks pressed against the reverse of the sheet, produced the soft luminous edges that read here as humidity or atmospheric haze around each blossom. The 1997 date places the work within the most productive late-career phase, when Summers worked in larger formats and pushed colour toward near-fluorescent intensity. Jungle subjects recur in his oeuvre after travels in Mexico, Central America, and Southeast Asia, where dense vegetation gave him compositional matter suited to his method's tendency to dissolve form into glow.