Dunes I

"Dunes I" marks a distinct departure from Hashimoto's characteristic architectural subjects, presenting instead a natural landform — most likely the coastal sand dunes of Tottori Prefecture or a comparable expanse along Japan's Sea of Japan coastline. The "I" designation indicates the first in a series, suggesting sustained engagement with the subject across compositional variations. Sand dunes offer the printmaker a subject of near-pure formal abstraction: repeating curved forms, shifting tonal gradations from sunlit crest to shadowed trough, and the near-absence of fixed linear structure. Hashimoto likely approached this through careful bokashi work — the graduated ink-blending technique used to model smooth, continuous surface transitions — and a restrained palette emphasizing warm neutrals of ochre, beige, and grey. Within his broader career, the dunes series represents an investigation into form stripped of the human-made structure that defines most of his work, testing whether his compositional sensibility could operate without architecture as its scaffold.