Diary: Feb. 2nd, '78

A winter Diary entry from early February 1978, this woodcut and silkscreen print records what is typically the coldest period of the Japanese year. The combined technique — Noda's signature method by this point — merges photographic imagery with hand-carved woodblock surfaces. February in Japan is austere: bare branches, grey skies, occasional snow in the Kanto region. Noda was thirty-seven, midway through the first decade of a practice that would define his career. Each Diary print from this period established the visual grammar he would use for the next four decades: a date, a scene, the quiet insistence that this particular day mattered enough to be preserved in print.