
Blue Fuji
by Ido Masao
- Medium:
- Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)
- Image courtesy of
- Saru Gallery
Description
Mount Fuji rendered predominantly in blue tones, a treatment with long precedent in the woodblock tradition — notably in Hokusai's blue-Fuji prints from Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, which used imported Prussian blue (bero-ai) for the dominant chromatic register. Ido's contribution to this lineage likely emphasizes a single chromatic mood: the mountain's silhouette in cobalt or indigo against a paler sky, with snow accumulated on the upper slopes. Mokuhanga technique handles the Fuji subject through bokashi gradients describing the mountain's slopes from base to summit and the sky from horizon upward. The print acknowledges and extends a canonical subject of the Japanese woodblock tradition while applying the technical conventions of contemporary mokuhanga: precise registration across multiple blocks, clean color separation, and washi paper hand-printed with the baren.



