scroll 29 x 78 in

A very Western looking landscape of a path leading through a woods to the mountains.

Mountain

Landscape

I found this very large unsigned watercolor landscape in a bin of torn and damaged scrolls in an old book dealer in Kyoto. The paper it was done on is brittle and cheap, as was the paper it was mounted with. It may have been a study, sketched en plein air, of an actual scene (the Nagano Alps?) Perhaps it was done during the war years, when materials were scarce, by someone escaping social hardships, retreating into nature. In any case, despite the damage, it has an evocative 3-D effect that pulls your eye onto the path and into the far away mountains.

Re-mounting this piece was challenging--lots of repairs and patches. I mounted it with hand-dyed mottled pale indigo silk meant to suggest open sky. The finished scroll is over six feet long.