Dogwood 10

Dogwood 10 continues Namiki's numbered exploration of hanamizuki, the flowering dogwood, a recurring subject alongside his weeping cherries and tree scenes. The print presumably centers on a single dogwood in bloom, its horizontally tiered branches and four-bract flowers presented against a soft graduated ground. The flat geometry of the dogwood blossom suits mokuhanga technique well: each bract can be cut as a clean shape on a carved cherry-wood block and registered precisely against neighboring color layers using kentō marks. Namiki prints by hand on handmade [washi](/glossary/washi) with water-based pigments and a [baren](/glossary/baren), building the image from a sequence of impressions and using [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) for the background gradient. As a [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artist he is the sole maker of every stage of the print. Dogwood 10 sits later in this numerical sequence than Dogwood 4, and the two together show how Namiki re-approaches the same motif across multiple variants — a serial method that defines his approach to the trees and flowering subjects he has returned to over decades.