Forest Haze

Forest Haze is a non-metallic serigraph counterpart to Forest Breeze, rendering a wooded subject through flat tonal separations rather than reflective ink. The title's haze indicates atmospheric perspective: the print likely stages multiple recessive bands of trees, with each successive layer screened in a paler, cooler hue to simulate the way moisture in the air desaturates and lightens distant trunks. This is a familiar device in Japanese landscape printmaking — historically achieved through bokashi gradients on a woodblock — and Shimura translates it into the serigraph idiom by stacking three to five distinct stencil layers, each cut to suggest a thinner or more distant tree-line. The image holds to a restrained palette, typically greys, dusty greens, and muted blues, with the foreground trees reading as the only sharply defined edges. Within Shimura's catalogue, Forest Haze sits alongside the meadow prints as part of his quieter, non-metallic register: works that demonstrate his command of pure flat color and stenciled atmosphere without recourse to the metallic finishes that mark his Fantasy, Fantasia, and Breeze editions.