Japanese Woods began as a charcoal drawing. The artists worked in the Japanese manner, building the croquis in soft black on paper, and the finished design keeps the weight and slight blur of that medium. Trunks thicken and thin, edges are not quite closed, and the whole has the loose authority of a study rather than the flatness of a print.
Its subject is daisugi, the practice of pruning a cedar so that a dozen straight shoots grow from one stool. It is a piece of forestry logic that happens to make a good design: within a single tree there is a whole wood, and the pattern uses that to build perspective out of very little. Trunks stand at different depths, the spaces between them close and open, and a flat wall acquires distance.
Printed on a non-woven ground, it comes on a generous 0.7 m roll with a 100 cm half-drop repeat, which offsets the trunks between drops so that no vertical seam is legible. Hung across a whole room the woodland has no visible end, which is precisely the point. It answers well in a bedroom, a study, or any small room that needs depth more than it needs pattern.
