Chasing the Colour of Evening

Colour samples

For the past few weeks I have been working on a new woodblock print inspired by a spring evening beneath the cherry blossoms. When I began, I imagined the difficult part would be the carving. Instead, I have found myself wrestling with something far more elusive: colour.

The scene itself seemed simple enough. Blossoms overhead, a quiet avenue stretching into the distance, a cyclist passing beneath the trees, and the last warmth of sunset dissolving into evening blue. Yet the longer I have worked on the print, the more impossible it has become to answer a seemingly straightforward question: what colour was it?

The blossoms are a good example. In my memory they glow with the unmistakable presence of cherry blossom. Yet under the cool light of evening they were not really pink at all. They hovered somewhere between white, silver and blue-grey. If I reproduce them exactly as they appeared, they risk losing their identity. If I make them too pink, they lose the atmosphere of dusk. Somewhere between the two lies the colour the print is searching for.

Close up of the sky and blossoms

The same problem appears throughout the image. The road shifts between mauve, violet and grey. The hedges alternate between deep shadow and spring green. The sky moves from warm gold near the horizon to cool blue overhead. Each colour depends upon every other colour around it. Alter one and the entire balance changes.

What has surprised me most is how little colour there actually is in the scene. When we think of cherry blossom season, we imagine pink blossoms and brilliant spring skies. Yet the atmosphere that drew me to this particular evening depends on restraint. The colours are subtle. The sensation comes from the contrast between warm and cool, light and shadow, rather than from any single pigment.

During this process I have found myself returning repeatedly to the prints of Kawase Hasui. What I admire is not their realism but their ability to distil a place into a mood. Hasui's landscapes often feel more atmospheric than reality itself. Looking at them, one realises that the purpose of colour is not merely to describe a scene but to evoke the experience of standing within it.

As the print has developed, I have come to understand that I am not really trying to reproduce what I saw. I am trying to reproduce what I remember. The two are not quite the same thing.

Memory edits reality. It simplifies, exaggerates and rearranges. Certain colours become stronger while others fade away. What remains is not a record of a place but an emotional impression of it. Perhaps this is why the great shin-hanga artists continue to feel so modern. Their prints are not documents. They are acts of remembering.

At the moment, sheets of trial impressions cover my studio. Some are too bright. Some are too pale. Some capture the blossoms but lose the evening air. Others achieve the atmosphere but sacrifice the sense of spring. Each failed proof reveals another possibility hidden within the woodblocks.

Final version but slightly too pale

The print is still unfinished. There are skies yet to print, shadows to adjust and colours to reconsider. Yet I am beginning to suspect that this uncertainty is not a problem to be solved but an essential part of the process. A woodblock print is built layer by layer, and perhaps memory works in much the same way.

The challenge is no longer to depict a street lined with cherry trees. It is to capture that fleeting moment when blossom, light and memory briefly become indistinguishable from one another.