Glorious Lemon

A still life of a single lemon, with chine-collé bonding a thin sheet of colored paper — typically a warm yellow or ochre tone — to the support during printing to carry the fruit's chromatic body without recourse to hand-coloring or multi-plate registration. The etched and aquatinted plate handles the leaf veining, stem, and surface pitting of the rind, while the inlaid paper supplies the saturated zest of the lemon itself. Single-object botanical studies of this kind belong to Imazu's broader catalogue of small-scale natural observation, in which individual specimens — a beetle, a seed pod, a folded leaf — are treated as portrait subjects rather than incidental detail. The lemon shifts the register from garden floor toward kitchen still life, and shows Imazu's willingness to extend the tiny-neighbours framework into the cultivated and domestic zones of suburban Australian life.