Chiryu 1906

This print, Chiryu, was made by Utagawa Hiroshige, sometime in the mid-19th century. Imagine Hiroshige, block cutter and printer, carefully layering color upon color to conjure this scene. There's a kind of bustling stillness to this image, isn't there? Muted blues and browns, with the pops of red signage. All those horses, heads down, quietly grazing. It's like Hiroshige captured a breath – that pause in the day before things get moving again. I wonder what Hiroshige was thinking about as he worked on this print? Maybe he was thinking about Hokusai, his contemporary, and that famous wave. Maybe he was thinking about how to make the ordinary, extraordinary. How to capture the feeling of a place, not just the look of it. The diagonal marks create the impression of wind across the page. The horses, the people, the pine trees – they are all part of a choreography. Artists, we're all in this big conversation, borrowing, riffing, and responding to each other across time. It makes you wonder what an artist like Hiroshige would make of our world today.