Arai 1906

This woodblock print, Arai, was made by Utagawa Hiroshige, sometime around the mid-19th century. It's all soft blues and browns, depicting boats bobbing in the water. I can imagine Hiroshige carefully carving each line into the wood, thinking about how the image will come together. The people in the boats, they’re right there in the moment, struggling with the sails and the waves. I can imagine the artist really considering what it was like to be there. The way the water is rendered, with its tiny, repetitive marks, reminds me a little bit of some of the minimalist painters, like Agnes Martin, who used repetition to create a feeling of calm and expansiveness. Hiroshige, like all artists, was in conversation with the world around him. Even though his work looks very different from Martin’s, they’re both exploring similar ideas about perception and experience, inspiring each other across time.