Waiting for Spring

"Waiting for Spring" (春を待つ, haru wo matsu) draws on a long-established theme in Japanese seasonal poetics, in which the bare or budding branch stands as a sign of the season not yet arrived. Ikuta's 2012 mezzotint approaches the subject through his characteristic dark-ground vocabulary, well suited to rendering the chill of late winter and the small bright incident — a swelling bud, an early blossom, or a watching bird — that signals the turning of the year. The technical demands of mezzotint, in which highlights are slowly recovered from a fully blackened plate, produce a gradual emergence from darkness that is itself a visual analog of the print's theme. The work fits comfortably within Ikuta's ongoing seasonal cycle, extending the nihonga-rooted attention to natural transition that he absorbed at Tama Art University into the intaglio idiom he has worked in almost exclusively since.