Diary Nov 12th '75

Diary Nov 12th '75 is an early entry in Tetsuya Noda's Diary series, the ongoing journal-in-prints that the artist has been adding to since 1968 and that established him as a central figure in contemporary mokuhanga-mixed-media practice. Each Diary sheet is labeled with the date it commemorates, functioning less as a conventional title than as a timestamp on a private record made public through print. The November 12th, 1975 entry comes from a period when Noda had recently completed his graduate work at Tokyo University of the Arts and was refining the hybrid technique that would become his signature: photographic images, often from his own snapshots of family, friends, and travels, are transferred via Gestetner mimeograph stencil onto handmade Japanese paper, then layered with woodblock-printed color. The combination yields a soft, slightly granular surface that is unmistakably photographic in source yet handmade in execution. In the mid-1970s Noda's palette tended toward restrained earth tones and quiet grays, and his compositions often isolated a single figure or object against a generous expanse of paper, giving even mundane subject matter the contemplative weight of a haiku. This impression is documented through the Robyn Buntin of Honolulu archive on ukiyo-e.org. As a 1975-dated Diary sheet, it represents a formative moment in a series that now spans more than half a century, demonstrating Noda's commitment to treating the print medium as a continuous, lived autobiography rather than a sequence of discrete editions.