AKIYAMA Iwao • 陰鬱な顔 • 1983 • 作者：創作版画 日本木版画 - Japan - 20th century

Artist: Akiyama Iwao (秋山巌, 1921–2014)
Technique: Woodblock print (mokuhanga) — Sōsaku-hanga, on heavy flecked Japanese folk washi
Date: 1983
Edition: 19/200
Format: Approx. 61 × 45.5 cm (24 × 17¾ inches) — an unusually large sheet for the artist
Poem: Block-carved haiku by Kobayashi Issa (小林一茶, 1763–1828), signed "Issa" (一茶) in the block
Signature: Hand-signed in pencil "Akiyama Iwao" (秋山巌), numbered 19/200 and dated 1983, with red artist's seal

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Impression & Colours: Excellent. A strong impression with the dense black sumi ink saturated across the whole mass of the owl.

Paper: Heavy, long-fibre folk washi, freckled throughout with the embedded dark mulberry-bark flecks characteristic of Akiyama's chosen support. There is gentle cockling and waviness across the sheet — a natural consequence of printing this much wet ink onto heavy handmade paper, and a feature of the medium rather than a defect. Please examine the photographs carefully and judge the surface for yourself.
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"Fix That Face" — Issa's Owl, Carved by Akiyama

A round, glowering horned owl fills the sheet almost edge to edge — a single great mass of black sumi, its breast dappled with pale grey teardrop markings, its ear-tufts cocked, its clawed feet just visible at the base. Two wide eyes stare straight out, each iris filled with a single drop of vermillion — the "red dot" that appears somewhere in nearly every Akiyama print, here doubled into a pair of glowing pupils. The bird is rendered in the artist's unmistakable folk idiom: a few thick, ragged carved lines, deliberately unschooled, that break and wobble with the grain of the block.

Above the owl, carved directly into the woodblock in bold hiragana and kanji, is a haiku by Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828), signed with his familiar "One Tea" name (一茶):

fukurō yo / tsurakuse naose / haru no ame
— "Owl! Straighten out that sullen face — spring rain is falling."

The joke and the tenderness are entirely Issa: he scolds the owl for its permanent scowl, as though the gentle spring rain ought to be reason enough to cheer up. And Akiyama gives him precisely the owl the poem describes — a magnificently grumpy, glaring bird whose tsurakuse (habitual sour expression) is written all over its face. As with his finest work, the carved verse and the carved animal are inseparable: the viewer does not read the haiku and then look at the owl, because the owl is the haiku.

Akiyama Iwao — Munakata's Heir and the Poet of Quiet Animals

Akiyama Iwao (1921–2014) was born in the rural town of Takeda in Ōita Prefecture, on the southern island of Kyushu. His earliest artistic training came, unusually, from a Buddhist monk who taught him drawing from the age of eight — a formative encounter that left a permanent imprint on his work, in both its quiet spiritual register and its lasting affection for the literary culture of Zen poetry. He graduated from the Taiheiyō Bijutsu Gakkō in Tokyo in 1956, having trained initially as an oil painter and a practitioner of suiboku-ga (ink-wash painting).

The decisive turn came in 1959, when he met Munakata Shikō (1903–1975) — the towering figure of twentieth-century Japanese printmaking and the most internationally celebrated sōsaku-hanga artist of all. Akiyama studied under Munakata until 1965, and the influence is unmistakable: the bold woodcut-grain line, the willingness to leave the carved mark visible and rough, the marriage of image with calligraphy, the rootedness in folk and Buddhist subject matter. But Akiyama was no imitator. Where Munakata's prints roar with kinetic, ecstatic energy, Akiyama's whisper. He narrowed his subjects radically — owls above all, along with cats, tigers, Buddhist monks and semi-abstract female figures — and found within that narrow circle an inexhaustible vein of quiet humour, tenderness, and observed truth.

His prints are recognisable at a glance: coarse folk paper that reveals its embedded bark fibres, dense black sumi against the cream of the washi, and tiny accents of vivid colour — most famously the red eyes of his owls — frequently paired with a carved verse by one of the wandering poets he loved (Taneda Santōka, Ryōkan, and here Kobayashi Issa). His work is held by the National Museum of Scotland, the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art (Haifa) and the Cincinnati Art Museum, among others. He continued working into his late eighties and died in 2014 at the age of ninety-three.