Snowy Night

Snowy Night — the first of two prints Rome made with this title — employs the mokuhanga palette's capacity for cold, desaturated blues and near-whites to evoke the particular quality of light on snow after dark. The quietness of snowfall, a subject recurring across Japanese print traditions from Hiroshige's winter landscapes to Hasui's shin-hanga snow scenes, is here filtered through Rome's abstract approach. Large areas of pale, cool pigment on washi suggest accumulated snow, while darker passages imply the compressed depth of nighttime shadows. The handmade paper's surface texture registers distinctly under pale washes, contributing a material grain that reinforces the subject's textural associations.