Hanga
Mt Fuji in the distance by Okiie Hashimoto — Japanese Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)

Mt Fuji in the distance

by Okiie Hashimoto

Medium:
Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)
Image courtesy of
Saru Gallery

Description

Hashimoto places Fuji at the horizon and gives the foreground over to intervening landscape — likely fields, a village roofline, or a stand of trees through which the cone is glimpsed. This compositional move, common in Edo-period meisho-e, sets up a tension between the near, particular subject and the distant, archetypal one. In Hashimoto's hands the foreground is built from the carved planes characteristic of sosaku-hanga: visible knife strokes, deliberate woodgrain showing through flat color, and a restricted palette held to a few blocks. The mountain itself is typically reduced to two or three shapes — slope, snowcap, sky — separated by registration rather than by graded bokashi. Hashimoto carved and printed every impression himself in keeping with the sosaku-hanga creed of the artist as sole maker. Within his oeuvre, distant-Fuji compositions read as a counterpart to his close-up architectural studies: the same structural eye, applied at landscape scale rather than to a temple wall or castle keep.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Mt Fuji in the distance was created by Okiie Hashimoto (橋本興家).

Mt Fuji in the distance depicts mount fuji.