Tree peonies

The third Tree peonies print continues Yamaguchi's serial reworking of the motif, in which the same shape vocabulary is rebalanced through changes in color weight, scale, and ground treatment. Compositionally, prints in this group tend to set a cluster of bloom-shapes against a much larger expanse of textured field, so that the named subject occupies only a fraction of the sheet and the remainder carries the visual argument through grain, knot, and tonal variation. Yamaguchi printed on absorbent washi using both oil-based and water-based pigments at different points in his career, sometimes combining the two for contrasting matte and saturated areas within a single image. Like his peers Onchi Kōshirō and Hiratsuka Un'ichi, he treated mokuhanga as a medium for personal expression rather than reproductive craft, and the Tree peonies series demonstrates how a traditional botanical subject can be carried into mid-twentieth-century abstraction without being abandoned.