Nostalgia in Blue 1968

Hiroyuki Tajima made this print, Nostalgia in Blue, and you can feel the process in the work, the hand of the artist. I love how it's not quite symmetrical, or perfectly geometric. The surface has so much texture, doesn't it? Look at the way the blue seems to float on top of the darker ground, and the marks like scribbles that look like they might have been drawn with a stick. The smaller blue square in the centre is gentler and speckled. It's a real lesson in layering, and it makes you want to try this yourself. This piece feels so connected to other printmakers, like Dox Thrash or even Ad Reinhardt, folks who really thought about surface and colour as a philosophical space. It's like Tajima is reminding us that art is a conversation, not a monologue.