Morning mist II

Morning mist II is a second treatment of a misted dawn subject, almost certainly a landscape in which a building, grove of trees, or distant ridge emerges partially through low-lying fog. Hashimoto's mist prints depend on overlapping bokashi gradations pulled by hand on the baren, with each successive impression softening rather than sharpening the forms, so that the keyblock outline only appears at the points the artist wants to anchor in the viewer's eye. The 'II' designation indicates a reworking of a composition Hashimoto had already taken to print, a practice consistent with the sosaku-hanga model in which the same artist carries each motif from drawing through carving and printing and is free to recut and re-register as his sense of the subject develops. The print sits within a small group of atmospheric studies — mist, snow, dusk — in which Hashimoto stepped back from the hard architectural geometry of his castle work to test what the woodblock medium could record about diffused light and partial visibility.