Windswept Pines 1909 - 1910

Kamisaka Sekka made this print, Windswept Pines, with woodblocks and ink, and you can really feel that process in the final image. It feels like he’s teasing out these shapes of trees with the bare minimum. The thing I love about woodblock printing is that combination of control and chance. Sekka uses a limited palette here – mostly greens, browns, blues – and flattens out the space, so you're left with these monumental forms. Look how the trees almost merge with the sky, and the negative space becomes just as important as the positive. Notice those white patches on the trunks? They're like ghostly echoes, adding depth but also disrupting the solidity of the forms. It's a real balancing act between abstraction and representation. Sekka reminds me a bit of the later work of someone like Etel Adnan, playing with landscape but pushing it towards something more internal, more felt than seen. Both of them show how art can be a conversation, across time and cultures, about the way we perceive and interact with the world.