Light, Time, Silence No.15

Stone lithograph from the artist's signature ongoing series begun in 1992. As an earlier-period iteration dating to 1998, the print would depict the spare interior subjects characteristic of the cycle: a wooden chair, a flight of stairs, or an open doorway. The lithographic stone permits a continuous tonal range from deep blacks through middle greys to the unprinted white of the sheet, building atmospheric depth around the architectural element. The title's three terms — light, time, silence — point to Yamamoto's interest in domestic spaces emptied of figures, where the sole inhabitants are shafts of daylight and the worn surfaces they fall across. Drawing on his MFA training in oil painting rather than printmaking, the artist treats the matrix as he might a canvas, modeling form through gradation rather than line. Sits within the early consolidation of a series that has since advanced past thirty numbered variations.