The Venus Meeting

A mokuhanga whose title points to the planet Venus rather than the Roman goddess, given its companionship with Machida's Jupiter prints, though the ambiguity may be intentional. If celestial, the subject likely depicts a planetary alignment, transit, or conjunction — events Machida would have followed with the technical interest of his scientific background, holding a Ph.D. from Tokyo University of Science. Venus rendered in mokuhanga calls for a different palette than Jupiter: typically the warm whites and cream-yellows of its reflective cloud cover against a deep night sky achieved through saturated indigo or sumi pigment passes. As with all sōsaku-hanga work, Machida designed, carved, and printed this himself on washi using the baren. The word 'meeting' suggests an encounter — perhaps Venus paired with another celestial body, or a more lyrical reading of arrival. Within Machida's body of work, this print belongs to the cosmological strand of his unusually wide subject range, which moves freely between landscape, folklore, figure, and astronomical themes without the specialization typical of his contemporaries.