Hill in approaching spring

A seasonal landscape filtered through Yamaguchi's abstract idiom, where the topographical subject of a hill is reduced to broad shapes and tonal fields rather than the detailed meisho-e treatment of earlier Japanese landscape printmaking. Approaching spring as a theme typically calls for a palette caught between winter and growth --- ochres, muted greens, soft pinks against still-cool grays --- and Yamaguchi achieved such transitional registers through layered bokashi and the use of unconventional block textures that produced soft, weathered surfaces on washi. The composition likely sets a single dominant landform mass against a contrasting sky or ground field, with the suggestion of vegetation or thaw through small textural incidents rather than depicted detail. This kind of pared-down landscape connects Yamaguchi to his teacher Onchi Koshiro's ideal of objective abstraction, in which observed subjects are translated into formal equivalents rather than transcribed. The print is part of his sustained postwar engagement with the Japanese seasonal calendar in non-representational terms.