Iris No. 161

Iris No. 161 continues Sugiura Kazutoshi's sustained engagement with hanashobu, the Japanese water iris associated with early summer and with garden imagery from the Heian period onward. The high number in the series indicates the depth of his investment in a single subject, with each variant reworking the same botanical motif through changes in palette, viewpoint, or background treatment. Compositionally, the print most likely centers a tightly cropped iris stem with one or two open blooms above linear leaves, a framing strategy that owes more to early twentieth-century shin-hanga botanical work and to Rinpa screen painting than to the wider edo-period meisho-e tradition. Sugiura's training at the Public College for Art in Kyoto and his subsequent five years studying classical Japanese painting at the Kyoto National Museum inform his attention to negative space and to the calligraphic energy of the leaf. As mokuhanga, the print depends on careful registration of overlapping color blocks rather than the gold-leaf and silkscreen layers of his more elaborate works.