Mt. Aso

The title identifies the active volcano in central Kyūshū, a recurring subject in twentieth-century Japanese printmaking. Maekawa's treatment likely simplifies the mountain into a small number of planes — the broad sweep of the caldera floor, the cone or cones of the active vents, and rising smoke or steam — rendered in restrained earth tones with limited bokashi for atmospheric weight. His landscapes tend to avoid the elaborate atmospheric drama favored by shin-hanga contemporaries such as Kawase Hasui, instead presenting geography in flatter, more graphic terms that emphasize shape and silhouette over weather. As a sosaku-hanga printmaker he carved and printed his own blocks himself, and the surface of such a print would show the texture of washi paper accepting hand-applied pigment, with visible tool marks in the contoured slopes. Mt. Aso as a subject connects the print to a wider documentary impulse in mid-century Japanese printmaking, in which artists travelled to and recorded particular landscapes as part of building a modern vocabulary of place.