Calla 8

Calla 8 shows the flower at a slight diagonal, the spathe tipped so that its opening reads as an asymmetric ellipse rather than a strict frontal oval. The off-axis presentation is one of the small compositional decisions that distinguishes individual prints within Tokitoh's calla series, where the basic format — a single bloom centered on an otherwise empty sheet — is held constant while posture, value, and edge treatment are varied. The print is executed by Tokitoh's customary method: each color drawn directly onto the silkscreen, then pulled with the squeegee about ten times to build up the close-valued, translucent surface. The body of the spathe carries a soft internal gradient that resolves toward a denser shadow at the base, where successive layers accumulate. Calla 8 sits late in the numbered run; by this point in the series the artist has narrowed her vocabulary considerably, and the variations between sheets are correspondingly small but legible to a careful viewer.