Diary: April 24th '97

Tetsuya Noda's Diary: April 24th '97 is a 1997 entry in the Diary series, the dated, autobiographical sequence that the artist began in 1968 and has continued throughout his career as the central body of his work in contemporary mokuhanga-mixed-media. Each Diary print is labeled by the day it commemorates, so the title functions less as a description than as a journal-style timestamp, anchoring the image in a specific moment of the artist's life. The April 24th, 1997 sheet, documented through the British Museum's holdings on the ukiyo-e.org aggregator, was made using Noda's distinctive hybrid process: a personal photograph is transferred to handmade Japanese paper via a Gestetner mimeograph stencil, then overprinted with hand-carved woodblocks that add areas of flat color and the subtle relief characteristic of mokuhanga. The photographic source provides the underlying image and its quietly granular tone, while the woodblock layers ground the work in centuries of Japanese print tradition. By the late 1990s Noda's compositions had grown increasingly confident in their restraint, often turning on a single figure or domestic detail set within a generous expanse of paper, an approach that gives the everyday subjects of the Diary the weight of a small ceremony. As an entry from this mature phase of the series, this print exemplifies how Noda has used the dated mokuhanga-mixed-media format to extend the language of Japanese printmaking into the realm of long-form, photographic, intimate autobiography.