Saka no shita 1906

Utagawa Hiroshige made this print of Saka no shita sometime in the mid-19th century. I can imagine him working with blocks of wood, carving away to create a landscape that feels both solid and dreamlike. Look at the way the mountain dominates the scene with its craggy, inky lines. It's a world made of texture and light, where the artist's hand feels present in every mark. Hiroshige, he’s not just showing us a place, he’s also making a little drama. The figures are small, almost like afterthoughts, yet they’re essential to the feeling of the piece. They give the landscape scale and a sense of the everyday. This reminds me of some of my own landscape paintings where I'm trying to capture a sense of place, but also a feeling. It’s this tension between representation and emotion that makes painting so exciting. Artists have always been in conversation, you know, picking up where others left off, pushing boundaries, finding new ways to see the world. Painting is just one way of sharing what we find.