Cat's tail

This second Cat's tail returns to the close observational study of a single feline detail, a pendant or variant to Fukami Gashu's other tail print. Treating the same motif twice was a familiar practice for Japanese printmakers, who often reworked a subject in a different palette, scale, or compositional crop to test the woodblock's range. A tail composition of this kind reduces the picture to a curving contour and a body of fur, asking the carver for a confident keyblock line and the printer for tonal control across the colour blocks, sometimes with bokashi gradation to suggest a soft transition from base to tip. Printed on washi using a baren, the result is closer to brush calligraphy than to descriptive illustration. Within Fukami's small documented body of cat prints---works that situate him in the lineage of Kuniyoshi's cat imagery---the paired tail studies suggest a printmaker willing to mine a single observation for repeated formal exploration rather than always seeking new subjects.