Lake Toya

This second variation on Lake Toya almost certainly approaches the subject from a different vantage or in a different season — a working method common among printmakers who treated a single motif as a serial investigation rather than a one-off image. Maeda's repeated returns to the lake parallel the way Hiroshi Yoshida revisited Mount Fuji and Kawase Hasui revisited the Inland Sea, but with a regional specificity that anchors his work in Hokkaido. Compositionally, alternative treatments of Lake Toya tend to shift the relative weight of water, foreground vegetation, and the volcanic backdrop, sometimes pulling the viewer to the shoreline and sometimes pushing the lake into a distant middle ground. The mokuhanga process accommodates such variation efficiently, since the artist can re-cut a few blocks while preserving others. The print again positions him at a remove from publisher-driven [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga): the choice to develop a personal Hokkaido cycle, rather than supply a single saleable view, aligns more closely with the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) ethos of the artist as the sole author of every stage.