(House and tree)

Hodaka Yoshida

Hodaka Yoshida’s image of a lone house in a vast ochre field is exemplary of his late-career dive into Surrealism. As well, having never been a stranger to trying the untried, the photo-transfer engraving technique was relatively new to him and marked one of several distinct chapters in his long and ever-changing printmaking career.

(House and Tree) bears the influence of the pop art of 1970s New York, with its hints of Warholian photographic iconography. Yet it distances itself from those labels with the poetic simplicity of a soft palette and the use of disarmingly ordinary objects placed in alien settings. Yoshida appears to portray the house as a symbol for many things: a vessel, a fortress, a living being bearing witness to the passing of time. Yoshida’s work by nature is unpredictable, leaving the application of meaning to the viewer’s discretion.

Printmaker Hodaka Yoshida was born in Tokyo, Japan, on September 3, 1926, into the noted Yoshida family of artists. Father Hiroshi and mother Fujio were pioneers of embracing Western style in pre-war Japan, building a major collector clientele in America and England in the 1920s and '30s. Before the Second World War, their children were encouraged to carry on this tradition; Hodaka and his brother Toshi studied oil painting and woodcut at Daichii High School, considered the best in Japan at the time.

Like his parents before him, Hodaka was heavily influenced by Western art - though in his case, it was the rising stars of Abstraction and Surrealism that caught his attention, until then nearly unheard of in Japan. His work was well received and he began exhibiting frequently throughout Japan along with his wife, artist Chizuko Inoue (Yoshida). By the mid 1950s, he was showing abroad in Mexico and the United States. In 1952 he became a member of the Japanese Print Association, and his teaching career began when he took posts at universities in Hawaii and Oregon in 1957.