It isn't just that he looks like the bits of Japan I saw but didn't consciously notice, so now I look at them and say 'I saw that sky, those trees, those mountains in Japan but I don't remember where.' He looks like things I'm sure I saw in childhood, but can't place at all. Were they real, seen in France when I was five or Rome when I was nine? Or were they imaginary, illustrations in my mother's picture books from her childhood and adolescence? I think the latter somehow. I wish I knew more about graphic art in the 20's and 30's because it seems to me that British and French illustrators were doing the same sort of things as Hasui was, with often the same palette and the same forms. But his exposition abroad was in 1930, and these books I'm thinking of date from the 20's. All unimaginably long ago feeling, whatever.
It isn't just that he looks like the bits of Japan I saw but didn't consciously notice, so now I look at them and say 'I saw that sky, those trees, those mountains in Japan but I don't remember where.' He looks like things I'm sure I saw in childhood, but can't place at all. Were they real, seen in France when I was five or Rome when I was nine? Or were they imaginary, illustrations in my mother's picture books from her childhood and adolescence? I think the latter somehow. I wish I knew more about graphic art in the 20's and 30's because it seems to me that British and French illustrators were doing the same sort of things as Hasui was, with often the same palette and the same forms. But his exposition abroad was in 1930, and these books I'm thinking of date from the 20's. All unimaginably long ago feeling, whatever.
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