Teahouse 1956

Hodaka Yoshida made "Teahouse" as a print. The neutral palette with those small touches of green gives the picture a quiet, thoughtful mood. I love the way the stones of the path draw you into the space of the garden, and how the textures of the different surfaces have been rendered in print. See how the stones in the pathway have a rough surface, a kind of irregular texture, and then these big stones in the foreground are smooth and blocky. The surface of the ground around the path is really grainy, which gives the eye something to play with as it travels through the image. I am thinking about Morandi here and his quiet reductive still life paintings. This picture is less about showing us a place, and more about a feeling, an atmosphere and it does that in such an interesting way by focusing on surface and texture.