HARU-NO-KUMO (Spring Cloud)

A spring cloud drifts across a traditional Japanese townscape — "Haru-no-kumo" — casting its brief shadow and reflecting back the softened blue of the spring sky. Nishijima renders spring clouds with a lightness appropriate to the season: these are not the threatening storm clouds of summer or the heavy grey of winter, but the buoyant, luminous clouds of April and May that seem to float in celebration of the season's renewal. The architectural precision of his usual townscape work is here subordinated slightly to the cloudscape's atmospheric priority.