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](/glossary/washi) using water-based pigments and the [baren](/glossary/baren) — to subject matter beyond the conventional repertoire of Japanese landscape ([meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e)). The technique permits flat colour fields and broad [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations well suited to Mediterranean light, sea and stone. The piece exemplifies Binnie's extension of [shin-hanga](/glossary/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.