Egrets, I've Had a Few

The pun in the title aside, Egrets, I've Had a Few belongs to the [kacho-e](/glossary/kacho-e) tradition of bird-and-flower subjects that runs from Hiroshige and Koson through twentieth-century [shin-hanga](/glossary/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](/glossary/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](/glossary/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](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) sensibilities than to strictly traditional bird-and-flower formulas.