Calla 4

In Calla 4, the bloom is angled slightly toward the viewer, with the lip of the spathe rolling back to expose more of the inner cavity than is typical of a strictly profile composition. Tokitoh's silkscreen technique — drawing the motif directly onto the screen and pulling the squeegee roughly ten times per finished sheet — produces the watercolour-like internal gradient that defines the surface. The layered translucency is most legible at the edge of the spathe, where successive printings have accumulated to model a soft, rolled lip without recourse to outline. The palette stays within her usual range of muted grey, pale green, and warm off-white, the sheet itself contributing tonally where ink density thins. Calla 4 is one of the numbered prints in the artist's long-running calla series, in which each composition is treated as a distinct study of a single flower rather than a variation on a fixed image. The cumulative effect across the series is of close attention rather than reproduction.