Silver Forest 155

Silver Forest 155 transposes Shimura's recurring forest motif into a cool monochromatic register. The title suggests vertical tree trunks standing across a shallow, frieze-like depth of field — a composition the artist returns to repeatedly across both serigraph and woodblock editions. In his serigraph practice he is closely identified with metallic copper, bronze, gold, and silver inks; the Silver Forest title in mokuhanga points to an effort to carry a similar reflective coolness into woodblock, whether through pale gray ink layers or a silver-toned pigment laid down on the printed surface. Forest scenes in this manner typically rely on a small number of carefully cut blocks: one or two for the trunks, one for the canopy mass, and a tonal block for the ground or atmosphere between trees. By numbering rather than describing the image, Shimura treats Silver Forest as part of a continuing visual inquiry — one entry in a long sequence of woodland views in which the variable is tonality and metallic register rather than location.