Iris No 69 — 花菖蒲 No 69

The sixty-ninth iris in Sugiura Kazutoshi's series marks a moment in a long project of botanical and artistic exploration — the hana-shōbu rendered through the distinctive multi-layered technique the artist spent years developing after training in Kyoto and studying classical Japanese painting. The number sixty-nine falls within a cluster of works where Sugiura appears to have been experimenting with the relationship between the flower's internal structure and the compositional framing, sometimes cropping the bloom so that its petals bleed off the image edge, suggesting a subject larger than any single print can contain.