Mt. Fuji 1976

Funasaka Yoshisuke made this print called Mt. Fuji, and well, it's definitely not a landscape in any traditional sense. It's more like a feeling of a landscape remembered, or maybe reimagined. That hot, red-orange color is intense, like the sun beating down, and those faded circles in the background... I wonder if they're meant to be clouds or some kind of atmospheric haze? The artist is playing with this tension between flatness and depth that I love. Then you've got this jagged vertical river or land formation down the left, with flashes of blue and green that are kinda trippy. Finally, this stark black line traces the outline of the mountain. I imagine Funasaka-san experimenting in the studio, using the hard edges of the mountain to play against the soft atmospheric depth of color, and I wonder if he was thinking about what is real and what is imagined. Artists are always responding to one another, across time, inspiring each other to see the world in new ways. It’s more interesting to ask questions than find easy answers.