Mount Fuji

The third in Yamaguchi's group of Mount Fuji prints continues his exploration of the volcano's silhouette as a vehicle for compositional experiment. Across his Fuji prints he varies the relationship between the mountain and its ground: sometimes the cone occupies most of the picture plane as a heavy, weighty mass; other times it appears as a thin, distant trapezoidal accent. The technical means remain consistent --- carved cherry blocks, washi paper, baren-applied pressure --- but the compositional accent shifts. Yamaguchi's repeated returns to Fuji parallel his treatment of other recurring motifs, including temples and seasonal subjects, and reflect the sosaku-hanga conviction that creative printmaking draws meaning from the artist's own sustained engagement with chosen forms rather than from publisher-driven series. As a prominent abstractionist of the postwar Japanese print, Yamaguchi made Fuji a vehicle for the same formal language --- balance, texture, color tension --- that animates his fully non-representational works.