Los Angeles midday moon

A product of Hiratsuka's American period, which began in 1962 when he relocated to Washington, D.C., and included extended travel across the United States. The title pairs an unexpected diurnal moon with the flattened light of Southern California, a juxtaposition consistent with his interest in pictorial moments where natural and built forms register as graphic shapes rather than atmospheric description. In a black-and-white woodcut, a daytime moon is conveyed through reserve — an unprinted disc held against tonally carved sky — rather than through the bokashi gradations the shin-hanga school used for nocturnal effects. Hiratsuka's American prints frequently treat civic and topographic subjects with the same compositional logic he had applied to Japanese temples: large flat masses, a strong horizontal or vertical anchor, and small carved incidents that animate broad fields. The Los Angeles subject sits within a sequence of place-based works he produced during his thirty-two years abroad, before his return to Japan in 1994.