Egrets, I've Had a Few

The pun in the title aside, Egrets, I've Had a Few belongs to the kacho-e tradition of bird-and-flower subjects that runs from Hiroshige and Koson through twentieth-century shin-hanga practitioners. Egrets, with their long necks, slender legs, and white plumage, are a recurring motif in Japanese printmaking because their silhouettes read clearly against water, reeds, or rice fields, and because the white of unprinted washi can stand in for their feathers, leaving the carver to define the bird through edge and accent rather than fill. A print of this type typically uses a limited palette, with bokashi water or sky behind the figures and fine key-block work for beak, eye, and wing detail. Shimizu's training under Tokuriki, whose own kacho-e prints are part of the Showa-era extension of the genre, sits behind this kind of subject, though her looser, more personal handling places the work closer to contemporary sosaku-hanga sensibilities than to strictly traditional bird-and-flower formulas.