Upward

Upward is a mokuhanga landscape oriented on vertical movement — tree trunks rising through the picture plane, a hillside ascending toward a pale sky, or the upward reach of bare branches in winter. The vertical compositional axis resists the horizontal panorama common in Western landscape convention and aligns Brodbeck's work with the hanging-scroll sensibility of East Asian painting traditions she studied during her training in Japan. Water-based pigments on washi allow the pale, luminous ground of the paper to function as sky or atmospheric light at the top of the composition, with darker pigment masses anchoring the lower register. The single upward movement creates a sense of directed attention and formal economy.