Diary: Sept. 1st '74, 1974

Diary: Sept. 1st '74 is a 1974 sheet in Tetsuya Noda's Diary series, the dated, journal-like sequence of prints that he began in 1968 and has continued for decades as the defining project of his contemporary mokuhanga-mixed-media practice. The early 1970s were a formative stretch for the series: by this point Noda had refined the hybrid process that would become his signature, in which a personal photograph is transferred to handmade Japanese paper through a Gestetner mimeograph stencil and then overlaid with impressions from hand-carved woodblocks. The combination produces a surface that is photographic in source, with the characteristic stippled grain of mimeograph transfer, but unmistakably handmade in execution, with the soft bite of the block and the absorbent presence of washi. The September 1st, 1974 entry, held in Harvard Art Museums and accessed through the ukiyo-e.org aggregator, comes from a period when Noda often centered his compositions on a single figure or object against a wide expanse of paper, lending small domestic moments a contemplative gravity. The Diary format strips away the conventional apparatus of titling and series numbering in favor of a simple date, which functions as both timestamp and emotional cue. Encountered today, this sheet reads as an early proof of the experiment that has since made Noda's Diary one of the most important sustained projects in postwar Japanese printmaking: a body of work in which the dated print becomes a quietly radical form of autobiography.