Early spring

Early spring places Hoshi's tree at the threshold of the year's first growth, a seasonal moment he returned to repeatedly across the 1960s and 1970s. The composition typically presents bare or barely-budding branches articulated against a pale, atmospheric ground — Hoshi favored muted ochres, warm grays, and softly graduated bokashi for these cusp-of-season prints, withholding the dense foliage of his summer trees. The branchwork is carved with characteristic precision: each twig registered as a discrete line, the trunk built up through deep-relief embossing that gives the bark its physical, almost tactile presence on the washi sheet. As with all of Hoshi's mature work, the print was designed, carved, and printed by his own hand in the sosaku-hanga tradition. Early spring belongs to the broader seasonal cycle through which he organized his obsessive tree subject, distilling the year's transitions into a vocabulary of branch, ground, and embossed surface that he refined for nearly two decades.