Almost Home

Almost Home suggests a return subject — a figure approaching a house, a path winding toward a lit window, a familiar landscape seen from the last bend of a road — the kind of image that sits within the broader Japanese landscape tradition of meisho-e but reframed through a personal, autobiographical lens common to twentieth- and twenty-first-century sosaku-hanga. Compositions of this type typically use atmospheric perspective rather than linear: a foreground darker and more detailed, a middle ground softened with bokashi, and a distant element — a roofline, a hill, a light — held in lighter tones to draw the eye through the picture plane. Shimizu has worked in mokuhanga continuously since the mid-1970s, when she trained under Tokuriki and Funasaka in Japan and later married Katsumi Shimizu, and her practice has consistently treated landscape as a vehicle for quiet narrative rather than spectacle. The water-based pigments and dampened washi typical of the medium support the muted palette such a subject calls for.