Pine 11

"Pine 11" extends Manami Ito's ongoing engagement with the matsu as a meditative subject, here positioned within the wider landscape setting that the print's tag suggests. Drypoint on copper allows Ito to build the dense canopy and surrounding garden through thousands of fine, individually drawn lines, each one raising a slight burr that holds ink and prints with the soft, velvety blacks characteristic of the technique. The branch structure is likely rendered through layered hatching that varies in pressure and direction, while flatter, lighter passages — distant trunks, water, raked gravel — are suggested by sparser intervals between marks. Within Ito's wider practice, the Pine series functions as a sustained study of the same motif under shifting compositional decisions, drawing on the disciplined observation of garden trees that has defined her work since her KCUA training in Kyoto.