Toshi Yoshida - Screen print, Cherry blossom. - Sold

One of the most famous Japanese woodblock artists of the 20th century, Toshi Yoshida was the eldest son of Hiroshi Yoshida (1876-1950), a highly successful printmaker in the shin-hanga movement, who specialized in the subject of landscape. During his childhood, an illness kept him out of school and he enjoyed watching animals and his father's graphics workshop. Encouraged by his grandmother, Toshi often sketched animals.
During his artistic career, Toshi Yoshida struggled to find a balance between remaining loyal to his father and developing his own style, while attempting to renew the waning ukiyo-e tradition as a shin-hanga artist. Although he chose animals as his specialty in 1926, his early works through the 1950s, such as 'Tokyo at Night' (1938), adopted landscapes in a style similar to his father's. However, compared to Hiroshi's extensive, subdued and monumental landscape prints, Toshi's use of rich and deep colors succeeds in expressing candid traditional Japanese landscapes.
The death of his father in 1950 marked Toshi's complete break with his past and he produced a series of abstract prints. These experimental designs draw on expressionism and pop art with bold color palettes. Respect for his father had prevented Toshi from trying before, but after a few years he returned to his original realistic style and his innate affinity with animals and birds. From 1971 to 1994, until the last years of his life, Toshi worked almost exclusively on animal prints. Toshi was also a children's book illustrator. He wrote his own short stories and made illustrations in the 'Animal Picture Book' series. As with his father's prints, Toshi signed his works of art in pencil and very often the titles are in English.