Tide

"Tide" depicts the meeting of water and shore, a subject Kasamatsu returned to throughout his career. The composition likely employs extended bokashi — graduated color applied to the block before printing — to register the wet sheen of receding water against drier sand or rock above. Kasamatsu's seascapes generally favor flat planes of color over linear detail, with the rhythm of the waterline carrying compositional weight. The print sits within Kasamatsu's broader treatment of coastal subjects, which he produced both during his shin-hanga collaborations with Watanabe Shozaburo and Unsodo (from 1932 onward) and in his later self-published sosaku-hanga work, when he carved and printed his own blocks. The atmospheric sensitivity to natural phenomena remains characteristic across his approximately 280 designs and the seven decades of his working life.