Daughter-in-Law C. Yoshida (and Granddaughter A.)

         I’m not finished with the Yoshida family yet.  Today I’m focusing on Hiroshi and Fujio’s daughter-in-law, wife of their younger son Hodaka.  Chizuko Yoshida (Japan, 1924-2017) joined three art associations when she was in her twenties.  One was a painting society founded by Hiroshi Yoshida, a second was a group for women oil painters founded by Fujio Yoshida, and the third was an avant-garde association in which Chizuko became interested in the push and pull between Western modernism and traditional Japanese aesthetics.  After she married Hodaka in 1953, around the time she was switching from painting to printmaking, she was influential in getting him involved in modernism, which also eventually influenced the work of Fujio and of Hodaka’s brother Tōshi.

        By way of choosing which pieces to share today, I wanted to post my favorites, but I also wanted to show the sweep of Chizuko’s various styles over time, which meant including some pieces I don’t actually care for.  So I’ve started with two pieces from the 1950’s, the first being one that I like a bit more, and the second being one that’s more representative of her early woodblock work, which tends to look to me like a lot of random stuff thrown together.

        Next, here’s a piece from the 1960s, during which Chizuko was doing a lot of work with embossing.  These don’t excite me, although I do feel the allure of embossing - especially since that’s one thing that rubber blocks and the back of a wooden spoon just can’t do.  You can see, though, that Chizuko was doing her own version of op art, which you can compare with some of the pieces I shared from her husband and her brother-in-law.

        These final two pieces date from the 1970s and are the ones I find most attractive.  I’m very partial to collections of natural forms that evoke both science and art.  However, to get that scientific detail of all different species of shells and butterflies, Chizuko used a combination of photoetching and woodblock printing, a combination Hodaka was also using extensively (although he was depicting primarily manmade, architectural images, rather than natural ones).  So even though I like these as art, I’m much less interested in them from a printmaking perspective, because photoetching sort of skips the actual physical creation part, which I love.  On the other hand, I wanted to include them as representative of some of Chizuko’s later work.  (Chizuko made a whole series of butterfly pieces over a long period, and I can certainly see why they’re popular.)  I also really like that today’s first piece and last piece, made more than 25 years apart, both represent blue butterflies.

        Finally, I want to include a piece by Chizuko and Hodaka’s daughter Ayomi Yoshida (Japan, b. 1958) who is also an artist.  Ayomi doesn’t get a whole post of her own because I don’t for the most part care for her work, (and later she also got into “deconstructing” block printing by making installations of blocks and chips, which interests me only to the extent that it irritates me as a waste of a wonderful medium!)  However, Ayomi certainly belongs in any discussion of this famous printmaking family, so I include one piece from 1989 that’s pretty cool.  All the gouges are pretty much the same - one tool, same direction, same size - but the arrangement and colors turn it into light on water.  You can see an op art influence in this, too.

        So, seven artists over 4 generations in one family - and each of them pushing and pulling to find their own voice and style.  It must be both encouraging and constraining to be surrounded by so much artistic inspiration, advice, support, and opinion.

[Pictures: Butterfly B, woodblock print by Chizuko Yoshida, 1953 (Image from Asian Art Museum);

Night in the Desert, woodblock print by C. Yoshida, 1959 (Image from Art Institute Chicago);

Blue Line, woodblock print by C. Yoshida, 1960s (Image from MFA Boston);

Reef, Shell C, photoetching and woodblock print by C. Yoshida, 1976 (Image from The British Museum);

Valley of Butterflies, photoetching and woodblock print by C. Yoshida, 1979 (Image from Art Institute Chicago);

Touches 2W -C.V.B., woodblock print by Ayomi Yoshida, 1989 (Image from Art Institute Chicago).]