Blue mountain & sea

A landscape composition reduced to its essential elements — a mountain mass and a stretch of water — treated in flat planes of blue with minimal modeling. Where Hokusai or Hiroshige built [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) through atmospheric distance and figural staffage, Kawakami strips the form back to silhouette and pattern, closer to a folk-art signboard than to nineteenth-century landscape. The mokuhanga technique allowed him to lay down broad, even color through hand-rubbed [baren](/glossary/baren) application, with the woodgrain occasionally showing through as texture. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation, if used at all in a print like this, is subordinate to flat blocks of color. Kawakami spent much of his teaching career in Utsunomiya in Tochigi Prefecture and had a sustained interest in the landscape around him; his landscape prints share a sensibility with the few [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artists, including Unichi Hiratsuka, who pursued a deliberately archaic, folk-rooted approach to natural subjects.