Iris No 136 — 花菖蒲 No 136

Entry one hundred thirty-six in Sugiura Kazutoshi's iris series shows the hana-shōbu with the characteristic richness of his mature work — the layered silkscreen and woodblock technique producing chromatic depth that rewards close examination. At this point in the long series, Sugiura has exhausted obvious compositional variations and must find subtler forms of difference: a slightly different quality of the gold ground, a marginally more open or compact arrangement of blooms and leaves, a shift in the saturation of the iris's characteristic violet-blue tones. These subtle differences accumulate into a body of work of remarkable internal variety.