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- aware of the influence of Japanese prints on Impressionism and Post- Impressionism in the West. When he turned to the medium of woodblock printing at the age of forty-four, he devoted his entire energy to the process and sought to merge the artistic concepts of the West and the East. He was a creative genius who developed a number of new techniques and innova�tions in the print medium. He took extreme care that his prints had a uniformly high quality. He was a perfectionist and would destroy any print that he was not completely satisfied with. His painstaking efforts sometimes involved making 96 colour print impressions to create a single print. The process sometimes involved several impressions of similar or contrasting colours on the same blocks. He had endless care, skill and patience. He loved to show the changes of the time of day and would often use the same blocks with different pigments to create the moods of the day, like the freshness of the morning or the cool shades of the evening.
Printmaking was a labour of love for him and he felt the only way he could ensure the highest quality of the print was to personally supervise each stage of the printmaking process. The most notable of his block carvers were Yamagishi Kazue and Maeda Yujiro. Yoshida occasionally printed on silk, used zinc plates for fine details, used woodblocks made of wood other than cherry wood and is even known to have carved some of his own blocks for his prints and to have developed the colour shades and tones for the pigments which were used. This large palette of merging pigments and tones allowed him to achieve a real sense of three dimensionality. His prints were quite different from the clear black border lines found in the ukiyo-e
Mt. Fuji from Ukishima Lake, Yoshida Hiroshi (1876-1950), watercolour, 24x49.5 cm. Fred and Isabel Pollard Collection, aggv 68.266.
14 AGGV COLLECTS/SHIN HANGA
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