Sacred Mountains 7

A mezzotint from Hiroshima's ongoing Sacred Mountains series, begun in the early 2010s and continued periodically over the following decade. The mezzotint process — rocking a copper plate to a uniform burr that prints dense black, then burnishing selected areas back toward white — suits the depiction of mountain ranges shrouded in cloud or evening light. The seventh entry likely renders a single peak from Japan's tradition of reizan (sacred mountains), such as Fuji, Tateyama, or one of the pilgrimage sites associated with Shugendō practice. Hiroshima's tonal vocabulary, refined through decades of contract printing for other artists, allows the silhouette of a ridge line to be coaxed out of an otherwise solid black field through patient scraping. The Sacred Mountains group sits adjacent to his more familiar studies of insects and small animals, extending the same attentiveness to graduated dark tone toward landscape scale and Japan's long tradition of meisho-e devoted to spiritually significant terrain.