Gold Forest

Gold Forest is a serigraph in which metallic gold ink is used as a substantive color rather than as accent, almost certainly depicting a dense screen of vertical tree trunks against a luminous ground. Shimura's wood subjects characteristically arrange the trunks as a rhythmic palisade across the picture plane, with the negative spaces between them carrying the tonal interest — here likely a gold field that catches and shifts light according to the viewer's angle, a behavior unavailable to either traditional nishiki-e pigments or to standard offset color. The technique requires the metallic ink to be pulled through a coarser mesh than the chromatic layers, and registration becomes critical because gold is unforgiving of overlap. Within Shimura's catalogue this print sits alongside Copper Wood, Silver Birch, and the various Bronze editions that together form his metallic forest series, the works that have defined his reputation in the British contemporary serigraphy market and that distinguish his practice from the matte flat-color tradition of postwar Japanese silkscreen.