Wild Fridays: [Winter]
Illustrator Simon Wild continues his ‘Wild Fridays’ column with a look ahead to winter.
It is usually at this time of the year that my attention turns to the promise of snow as winter begins to tighten it’s grip. I have always found snow to be a mysterious and beguiling and every year the child in me hopes to wake up and see at least a dusting.
Snow is strange thing and I have been fascinated with it all my life. One flake can land on your finger and melt in an instant, But on weather charts it swirls around like an angry beast and can ground planes and bury cars, as we have seen this week with the unprecedented storms in New York. But snow can also add beauty to a landscape like nothing else can.
This week I have been looking at Japanese woodblock prints of winter scenes and marvelling in their technical precision and the romantic notions they portray. Created as early as the Eighteenth century, these artists works look as fresh today as the day they were printed and have clearly played their part in laying down the path for todays contemporary illustrators to tread.
Tsukioka Yoshitoshi 1839-1892 Gentoku visits Kômei in the snow
Utagawa Hiroshige Gion in snow 1834
Utagawa Hiroshige Mountain and river on the Kiso Road 1857
Have a great weekend!