Papa's Farm

A companion to Grandma's Farm within Shimizu's Village Scenes thread, this print presents a parallel rural subject from her family memory, likely treated with the same multi-block approach as the related work. The pairing of Grandma's and Papa's suggests two related but distinct properties or perspectives on the same landscape—a pictorial diptych without being formally one. In mokuhanga practice, paired prints often share a key block scheme but differ in coloration and registration, which lets the artist work variations on a settled compositional armature. Shimizu studied under Yoshisuke Funasaka, whose teaching emphasized adaptation of traditional methods to contemporary personal subjects rather than strict reproduction of historic styles; this orientation is visible in works like Papa's Farm, which apply baren-printed water-based color and nori-bound pigment to a subject lying outside the Japanese landscape canon while preserving the medium's quiet surface and tonal restraint.