Omou-2

"Omou" (思う) is the Japanese verb meaning "to think," "to feel," or "to remember"; the "-2" places this print early in a numbered series. Yoshikawa's titles tend toward this kind of unanchored introspection — the verb names a mental act without specifying its content, leaving the abstract image to carry the affective weight. Printed as a multi-block mokuhanga, Omou-2 would have been pulled by hand using a [baren](/glossary/baren) onto dampened [washi](/glossary/washi), with water-based pigments mixed with rice paste (nori) to control absorption and produce the medium's characteristic soft color surface. Yoshikawa's compositions read as dense and dynamic rather than minimal or quiet; the palette tends saturated; the mood, even in a contemplative title like this one, remains warm rather than melancholy. Her prints are not about thinking in the sense of symbolic representation — there are no thought-bubble icons or pensive figures — but rather thinking as a sensation, registered through color and shape. This puts her work in dialogue with the mid-twentieth-century Sōsaku Hanga embrace of abstraction as a legitimate hanga vocabulary.