In the bath

In the Bath places the female figure within the act of bathing itself — submerged in or actively washing within a tub — rather than in the before or after moments that characterize many of Goyo's related prints. The subject requires the artist to render wet skin and the distorting and reflecting surface of bathwater, technical problems that demand the full range of shin-hanga printing craft. Submerged passages would be handled through transparent color washes allowing the figure beneath to read through the water's surface, while reflections and surface movement would require fine carved lines to suggest optical complexity. Goyo's academic training in Western figure drawing provided the anatomical foundation for the distorted and foreshortened forms that water immersion creates. The intimacy of this subject — the figure at her most private and physically exposed — is typical of the psychological register Goyo consistently sought in his bijin-ga.