Winter Forest I

This woodblock print, the first in a series on winter forests, captures the starkness of deciduous woodland after the leaves have fallen. The bare branches, exposed trunks, and open sight lines of a winter forest create a graphic subject ideally suited to Matsubara's black-and-white woodblock technique. Without foliage to soften and fill the composition, the skeletal structure of the trees dominates, revealing patterns of growth and branching that are invisible during other seasons. The winter forest reduces the visual world to its essentials: trunk, branch, sky, ground. Matsubara's carved lines echo the bare branches themselves, both being hard, linear marks made in resistant material. The "I" designation indicates this is the first of multiple explorations, the beginning of a serial investigation into winter's visual austerity.