Night Has Begun

An atmospheric night scene whose evocative rather than descriptive title is characteristic of Ikuta's mid-2000s work. With no specific subject named, the print likely reads as a transitional dusk-into-night image — perhaps a moon, a silhouetted tree, or a single bird placed against a deeply saturated field. Mezzotint is the natural medium for this kind of mood-driven nocturne: because the plate begins fully inked from the rocker's uniform burr and is worked from dark toward light, the ground state of any mezzotint is already night, and the artist's task becomes deciding how much light to admit. Ikuta's compositional restraint — typically one or two luminous forms isolated against the dark plate — is the formal counterpart of this material logic. The 2004 date situates the print in the period when Ikuta's nocturne vocabulary was at its most refined, with two decades of self-directed practice behind him and a stable international collector base sustaining the small-edition output of his Yamagata-based studio.