Putting Air Into the Picture! Letting Air Out of the Picture

The title proposes the picture plane as a vessel that can be inflated or emptied, a quietly comic phrasing about the management of negative space and atmosphere in image-making. In mokuhanga terms, 'air' is what the printer leaves to the unprinted [washi](/glossary/washi): the fiber and tone of the paper itself, exposed between areas of pigment, carrying its own compositional weight. The [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) technique—graduating pigment from saturated to transparent across a block by careful brush wiping—is the literal mechanism by which an artist puts air into or lets it out of a printed surface. Shiomi's title reads as a printmaker's reflection on her own working procedure, closer to studio aphorism than to depicted scene. The print likely sets two states or moments against each other, perhaps as paired panels, registering the difference between dense and open pigment. Within her output, it joins the Newton, Dürer, and Ptolemy/Copernicus titles as a metareflection on the conventions of picture-making, where the medium's own constraints become the subject of the image.