Green Poplars

Green Poplars, produced across a decade from 1980 to 1989, depicts one of Europe's most architecturally distinctive trees—the Lombardy poplar, whose narrow columnar form rises sharply against the sky. The extended production period suggests iterative refinement of the color balance between the deep greens of the foliage and whatever ground or sky surrounds them. Poplars carry particular resonance within French landscape painting and printmaking traditions, familiar from Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, and Hamaguchi's Paris residency would have made them part of his visual environment. In color mezzotint, the vertical energy of the poplar form can be rendered through directional burnishing strokes, with the surrounding darkness providing a foil that makes the luminous greens of the foliage appear internally lit.