Details
The image
A bird on a branch with the branch drawn first and the bird placed on it, the contour of even weight and the colour laid flat inside the line. The sheet is mostly paper, and the emptiness is arranged so that the eye moves from the top left down towards the bird.
Where it comes from
Nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock printing was a collaboration: the designer drew, the cutter followed the line along the grain, the printer laid each colour from a separate block. The discipline of that division produced an image with no shading and no corrections, and European designers who encountered these prints found in them an argument against ornament that they used for a century.
On the wall
It suits a study, a bedroom or a reading corner, where a vertical image with open space makes a small room feel taller. Because the line is fine and the palette limited, it needs daylight and a wall that is not busy. In a group it should be the calmest piece.
In company
Hung beside another piece from the Taguchi Tomoki collection, it reads as part of a series rather than a single picture.Two sheets hung as a pair read as a sequence, which is how they were meant to be seen.
