Private-9

The "Private" series is one of Yoshikawa's recurring sequences, with numbered editions suggesting an ongoing exploration of personal compositional concerns rather than thematic narrative. Private-9 likely presents a tightly organized arrangement of geometric or biomorphic shapes worked through the multi-block mokuhanga process — each form requiring its own carved cherry plank, registered against the others by kento marks at the sheet edge. The "Private" designation hints at an interior pictorial logic: forms whose meaning is internal to the picture rather than referential to landscape, figure, or object. Yoshikawa's water-based pigments, mixed with rice paste and applied with a brush to the block before being pressed with the baren onto dampened washi, produce flat, evenly saturated color fields whose physical surface remains matte and absorbent. Within her four-decade body of work organized into named series like Private, Natu, and Kou, the numbered Private prints anchor the artist's most personally calibrated experiments in shape and color.