Hydra

"Hydra" most plausibly refers to the Greek island of the Saronic Gulf, situated in a Mediterranean landscape that Binnie has revisited in works depicting European and other non-Japanese locales. The print extends his practice of applying the traditional mokuhanga methods of carving and printing — collaborative rendering of his designs by Japanese craftsmen on washi using water-based pigments and the baren — to subject matter beyond the conventional repertoire of Japanese landscape (meisho-e). The technique permits flat colour fields and broad bokashi gradations well suited to Mediterranean light, sea and stone. The piece exemplifies Binnie's extension of shin-hanga's chromatic palette and tonal handling to scenes from his own travels, continuing a lineage that includes Hiroshi Yoshida's foreign-subject prints of the 1920s and 1930s, in which the Japanese woodblock idiom was applied to landscapes outside Japan.