Woman Calendar Big, Beauty in the Offing (3/50)

A Woman Calendar composition whose title — "Beauty in the Offing" — invokes the nautical term for the visible horizon of the sea, the zone between the foreground and the far distance where ships appear before they arrive and disappear before they are completely gone. Beauty in the offing is beauty approaching, beauty not yet fully present, beauty perceived across the distance of anticipation. Mayumi Oda's Hawaiian context gives this oceanic title additional resonance: the offing of the Pacific islands is an immense expanse of open ocean from which change approaches and into which everything eventually disappears. The early edition number (3/50) indicates this is among the first prints made from these blocks.