Kuta no Yuki

"Kuta no Yuki" — snow at Kuta, a village area — is a winter snowscape characteristic of Nishijima's engagement with rural communities in the mountainous regions of the Kinki and Chubu areas. The snowfall simplifies the complex texture of traditional agricultural and residential architecture into bold forms and clean contrasts: the dark timber against white snow, the mass of the heavy roof reduced to pure geometric weight, the landscape beyond lost in the white of continuing snowfall. His rural winter scenes carry a particular stillness absent from his urban subjects.