The Old Church Tower at Nuenen

Okuyama's mokuhanga rendering of Vincent van Gogh's 1885 oil painting depicting the demolished medieval church tower in the Brabant village where the Dutch painter lived from 1883 to 1885. Okuyama produced a series of woodblock translations of European paintings, treating the format as a way to test how Western pictorial conventions — linear perspective, atmospheric tonality, painterly brushwork — could be reformulated through the discrete color planes and visible grain of carved blocks. The composition centers the squared, partially ruined tower against an overcast sky, with mourners gathered around fresh graves at its base. Translating Van Gogh's heavy impasto required reducing his agitated brushwork into solid fields of muted ochre, dun, and slate, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation softening the transition between earth and sky. The print belongs to the impulse driving [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga)'s mid-century engagement with international art history: the conviction that the woodblock could absorb foreign material and function as an independent expressive medium.