Calm - No. 6

The sixth plate in Hamanishi's Calm series, this intaglio print belongs to a body of work whose title declares its expressive intent. Catalogued as an etching, the print is realised through the mezzotint technique that defines Hamanishi's practice, with the copper plate rocked to a full black ground and then burnished to recover the still, suspended forms the series stages. The Calm designation aligns the work with the meditative still-life tradition extended in twentieth-century Japanese printmaking by Yozo Hamaguchi, in which a small number of natural objects — leaves, fruit, seed cases, shells — are isolated against an absorbing dark field and rendered with prolonged tonal attention. The numbering through six implies a sustained engagement with the same compositional premise across multiple plates, each refining or recasting the previous. Hamanishi's mezzotint surface, with its characteristic blacks and slow tonal transitions, here serves a subject whose pictorial demand is for stillness rather than incident.