Evening

Created in 1921, this print captures the quiet transition from day to night in a Canadian landscape. Walter J. Phillips was a British-born artist who emigrated to Canada and became one of the most accomplished Western practitioners of the Japanese color woodcut technique. His evening scenes exploit the woodblock medium's ability to produce rich, dark tones: deep blues, purples, and blacks layered to create the velvety depth of a sky after sunset. The Canadian landscape provided subjects unlike anything in the Japanese printmaking tradition, with its vast open spaces, boreal forests, and the quality of northern light that lingers long after the sun drops below the horizon. Phillips would have carved and printed this work himself, in keeping with the sosaku-hanga principle of the artist controlling every stage of production.