Idetachi (from the series 'Primitive Energy Prints')

Hodaka Yoshida

In the 1950s Hodaka Yoshida created several works relating to folk art and religious art from Japan, Korea, and the pre-Columbian Americas. 1956 in particular was the year in which he produced several works that reflected these sensibilities, informed as well by his exploration of Western abstraction, and produced several images in very limited palettes that echoed the carved stone idols of all of these cultures. "Idetachi" could be entirely abstract, yet the shapes show similarities to bird-like and human-like forms and readily identifiable social charateristics: open-mawed beings in show-off stances, gathered as if to display their individual prowess.

This dynamic woodcut abstraction was done in blacks, grays, and earth colors by Hodaka Yoshida, done in 1956, after Yoshida had traveled to the United States, Cuba, and Mexico which left a deep impression on the artist. Between 1955 and 1963 he did a series of woodcuts he called "Primitive Energy Prints", abstractions of the primitive in Pre-Columbian forms acheiving a feeling of motion.

Hodaka, son of printmakers Hiroshi and Fujio Yoshida and younger brother of printmaker Toshi Yoshida became a printmaker, against his father's wishes. He said "My father's opposition made me an abstract artist, I've always liked Miro and Klee, but I don't know that either has been a concrete influence...I started to make prints around 1950 and I've carved and printed my own from the beginning."

In an interview with Ronald Robertson Yoshida talked about his process: "...I start with a vague idea or emotion which I try to visualize from various angles or points of view. Occasionally I succeed on fixing it as a clear image, but the original idea often develops into another object...An action inspires me with an idea which decides or stimulates the next action. Forms and colors thus produced are gradually organized into a picture...

Sometimes, I find, quite by chance, in an automatic drawing, a part of a sketch or stains on paper that which I had been looking for, and then I begin to work it out into a definite image."