Carnations in a vase

A second treatment of carnations in a vase, this print signals Kawanishi's habit of returning to favoured motifs and reworking them with different colour relationships, vase shapes, or compositional structures. The serial reworking of a still-life subject is more familiar from European easel painting than from classical Japanese woodblock, where commercial ukiyo-e tended to issue a print and move on. As a sosaku-hanga work, it allowed Kawanishi to treat the woodblock as a vehicle for the artist's evolving visual thinking rather than as a means of reproduction. The carnations themselves continue the kacho-e tradition only loosely: cut, arranged in a vessel, and treated as a formal still life, they belong to the cross-cultural genre that twentieth-century Japanese printmakers absorbed from Western painting and adapted to the materials of washi, water-based pigment, and hand-pulled blocks.