Japanese-Painter

 


 Koson Ohara 小原 古邨,  (1877–1945)

In the Edo period, when printing and photography techniques were not yet popular, ukiyoe prints were enjoyed by the masses as a form of entertainment. A wide variety of works were produced mainly in the city, including pictures of actors, beautiful women, and famous places. Along with it, beauties of nature designs also existed as a genre. Koson Ohara’s the beauties of nature prints, which appeared at the end of the Meiji era, were reborn into new prints with gorgeous colors and modern realistic expressions. The artworks were even widely accepted in the West. His Oriental and Western themed works became the new Japanese standard when painting the beauties of nature genre. In his works, the soft look of his love for the landscape around him can be felt. The flowers, plants, birds, and smalls animals are depicted with seasonal background sceneries like the moon, rain, clear sky, pure water, and peaceful snow, all of which are pleasant images of the 100-year old era. Koson created more than 600 kinds of beauties of nature prints.

 

Hiroshi Yoshida 吉田 博 (1876 –1950)

 The charm of Hiroshi Yoshida’s paintings is the expression of natural beauty that stems from his sincere approach to blend with nature when doing his works. When he painted mountains, he stood there for several months and waited for the moment to capture the beauty of nature. His strong belief that it was only when he was united with nature that he could draw landscapes impressed people. The latter half of his life was spent creating 250 different types of woodblock print. The realness of his woodblock prints was unprecedented, with large prints and powerful sizes and using 30 layers of print in multiple colors on the same woodblock.

 Yoshida’s works, which depicted new systems and technologies by introducing a Western perspective to the traditional Japanese woodblock prints, gained the attention of famous personalities like Princess Diana, Soseki Natsume, and Sigmund Freud, and are still gaining popularity worldwide. He also wrote a book about all the woodblock printing techniques he had studied for future generations.