A Cloister

A monochrome stone lithograph depicting a cloister — the covered walkway surrounding the courtyard of a monastery or convent, with regular columns and arched openings on one side. The subject extends Yamamoto's preoccupation with quietly inhabited interior architecture beyond the domestic settings of 'Light, Time, Silence' into a more explicitly contemplative space, retaining the same emphasis on threshold, repetition, and absent figures. Compositionally, cloisters suit lithographic treatment well: the receding rhythm of columns establishes a clear perspectival scaffold, while the alternation of light from the courtyard and shadow within the walkway provides the strong tonal contrast Yamamoto's stone work depends on. The artist has produced a small group of cloister prints alongside his staircases and apple trees as standalone subjects outside the main numbered series. Within Japanese contemporary printmaking, the choice of an essentially European architectural form is unusual and reflects Yamamoto's training in oil painting, a Western medium, before his shift to stone lithography in the early 1990s.