Gentle Tide

Gentle Tide is a serigraph landscape that, on the evidence of its title and Shimura's established compositional habits, likely depicts a low horizon of water meeting sky, with the shoreline rendered as a thin band rather than a dramatic break. Shimura's serigraphs in this register typically work through a narrow palette of flat color separations — pale blues, sea-greens, and warm neutrals — overlaid with atmospheric bokashi-like gradients pulled through the screen rather than brushed. The water surface is generally treated as parallel horizontal bands, an inheritance from the Japanese silkscreen tradition of Tetsuro Sawada and Reika Iwami in which marine subjects became occasions for studies in graduated tone. Within Shimura's wider body of work, which is dominated by terrestrial meadows, woods, and horizons, marine subjects function as the quieter counterpart: the same lyrical horizon-line composition pared down to two color zones. The print belongs to the strain of his Cambridge-period output that prefers subdued non-metallic surfaces over the gold and copper editions for which he is more commonly known.