Bronze Fantasy

Bronze Fantasy belongs to Shimura's signature series of metallic-ink serigraphs in which a horizon line and a band of vegetation are reduced to flat overlapping color separations, with bronze ink reserved for the foreground meadow or low canopy. The bronze pigment shifts in reflectivity depending on viewing angle, producing a quiet ambient sheen rather than a gilded surface — a technical inheritance from postwar Japanese silkscreen printmakers who treated metallic inks as a fourth tonal register alongside hue, value, and saturation. Compositionally the print likely follows the artist's habitual format: a low horizon, a tonally graded sky achieved through stencilled bokashi-like transitions across multiple screens, and a foreground stratum keyed to the title's metal. Shimura, working from Cambridge since the late 1970s, has produced this kind of meditative meadow-and-horizon image in successive editions for decades, varying season, light, and metallic key while preserving the underlying compositional armature. Bronze Fantasy sits within the warmer, more autumnal end of that series, paired conceptually with Copper Fantasy and answered tonally by the Silver and Gold prints.