Diary: Sep. 28th, '03

A late-September 2003 woodcut and silkscreen print, this Diary entry captures a day at the boundary between summer and autumn. In Japan, late September brings the autumn equinox (Shubun no Hi), a national holiday associated with visiting family graves and acknowledging the shift in seasons. Noda was sixty-three when he made this print, and the Diary series had accumulated thousands of entries over thirty-five years. The woodcut-silkscreen process — now refined through decades of repetition — layered photographic imagery onto hand-carved woodblock surfaces, producing prints that carried both the precision of a photograph and the material warmth of handcraft.