Dawn II 1989

Dawn II, dated 1989, indicates a sequel within a series concerned with daybreak, the emergence of light, or the transitional moment between night and morning. Atmospheric subjects of this kind are well suited to mokuhanga, where the technique of bokashi — the gradient achieved by applying pigment unevenly to the block and pulling a soft transition through the baren — can render the gradual lightening of sky without hard contour. The dawn theme has a deep precedent in Japanese pictorial tradition, from Edo-period meisho-e depicting famous places at first light to the atmospheric landscapes of the early-twentieth-century shin-hanga school. By 1989 the subject had been carried into more abstract registers by sosaku-hanga and post-sosaku artists, who treated dawn less as a topographic moment than as a chromatic event. Dawn II's late-Showa date and its position within a numbered sequence place it within this continuing reduction of landscape to color and atmosphere.