Het meer Kawaguchi 1937

Watanabe Kako made this print of Het meer Kawaguchi, it has a delicate blue-green palette. It's serene, even chilly, and I can only imagine the labor of love involved in capturing the mountain's snowcap! It’s always interesting to me, as a painter, to think about the conversations artists have with each other. I wonder if Kako ever looked at the work of Hokusai, who made his own famous studies of Mount Fuji. The mountain is so still and the water is active, and the marks on the water look gestural, like the movement of a brush. I imagine that Kako had to work hard to distill the scene to its simplest essence. Ultimately, artists build on each other's work, reinterpreting familiar images through their own unique lens. Each artist is engaged in the same act of reaching toward a vision.