Kumadori

The print depicts the stylised facial makeup of a kabuki actor, applied as bold lines over a white oshiroi base. Kumadori (隈取, literally "taking shadow") codes character through colour: beni (red) lines indicate righteous heroism, ai-guma (indigo or black) signals villains, ghosts, or supernatural beings, and chairo-guma (brown) marks demons. The lines trace and exaggerate facial musculature so that emotion reads from the back of a large theatre. As a lithograph drawn from Yamada's underlying watercolour and pencil portrait, the work translates the granular graphite passages and pigment washes of her drawings into the flat, planographic registers of stone or plate, printed in successive colours on absorbent handmade [washi](/glossary/washi) rather than smooth Western paper. The fibres of the rice paper soften the printed edge in a way closer to her original drawings than commercial offset permits. Within Yamada's body of work — primarily watercolour and pencil portraiture, with editioned lithographs forming a much smaller output — kabuki faces recur as a sustained subject drawn from her six years observing Tokyo theatre.