Here We Are at Glacier National Park

Here We Are at Glacier National Park positions the viewer within Montana's alpine landscape, the title's first-person plural suggesting a print that may include figures or evoke shared presence in the scene. Glacier's signature features — sheer cirques, hanging valleys, glacial lakes in startling turquoise — give Shimizu a subject that rewards saturated color blocks against deep shadow areas. The mokuhanga process can render the mineral blue-green of glacier-fed water through transparent layered impressions, allowing pigment to sit in the fibers of the [washi](/glossary/washi) rather than on its surface. The print extends Shimizu's documentation of American national parks into a body of work that parallels how earlier Japanese printmakers treated sacred mountains and famous places. Her compositional choices typically favor the structural over the picturesque, treating Glacier's geology with the same care a [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) print might bring to a celebrated provincial view.