Iris No 76 — 花菖蒲 No 76

The seventy-sixth iris in Sugiura Kazutoshi's numbered series is a companion to the several works that surround it in the sequence, sharing their general compositional approach while finding its own specific expression within the familiar subject of the hana-shōbu. Sugiura's practice of returning repeatedly to the same flower — more than one hundred and sixty times in the case of the iris — has occasionally been compared to the practice of zen painters who return to the ensō circle: each new mark in a long series tests not the subject but the practitioner's relationship to it.