Fuji from Kurasawa 1929

This is Fuji from Kurasawa, a woodblock print by Shotei Takahashi. What I like about it is the kind of in-betweenness of everything. It's not quite one thing or another. Look at the surface of the water, where the blue flattens out into a kind of all-over pattern, like a color field painting. Then you have these dark, almost gothic trees in the foreground, these verticals that pull you back into a more perspectival space. It’s like a stage set, or maybe a screen. There's also this funny little sailboat, a tiny white triangle amidst all that moody atmosphere. The whole thing is rendered so flat, but there’s also this real depth created by the gradations of color in the sky and the mountain. It reminds me of Arthur Dove’s landscapes, that same sense of capturing a fleeting moment, a feeling. Like with Dove, it’s not about a literal depiction of a place, but about the sensation of being in it.