Sample lithograph 01 (still life or landscape)

Tanaka's title leaves the subject ambiguous, but the still-life classification suggests an isolated object or small grouping rather than open terrain. Works of this type from her studio practice tend to position a single form — a vessel, a folded cloth, a fruit — against a flat tonal field, with the figure-ground relationship carried almost entirely by the grain of the lithographic stone itself. The print is executed in stone lithograph, the medium Tanaka has worked in since her graduate training at Kyoto City University of Arts in the early 1990s and now teaches in the Printmaking Department there. Her tonal range stays close to the monochromatic, built up through layered crayon and tusche on the stone rather than through colour contrast. The result reads as a study in restraint: the object is named more by its silhouette and weight than by surface detail. This sample sits within the body of work she has continued through the 2000s and 2010s, in which the quiet object and the austere ground are treated with comparable seriousness.