Standing before Trees, I experience first a kind of visual hush. The image is spare in palette, black branches against a pale, almost luminous sky, yet it is dense with articulation. The trunks rise vertically from the lower register, evenly spaced but not mechanically so, and then, above eye level, dissolve into a lacework of interlacing lines. The upper half of the composition becomes nearly all branch, an intricate filigree that both reveals and conceals the white ground behind it. The sky is not painted so much as it is allowed to remain. It is negative space as presence.
Martin Heidegger once wrote that “the work of art sets up a world and sets forth the earth.” In Tomioka’s print, I sense precisely this tension. The black carved lines “set up a world,” a forest, a rhythm of trunks, an architectural canopy, while the untouched white of the paper “sets forth the earth,” that which withdraws even as it grounds the image. The white sky is not empty; it is what resists capture. It is what remains uncarved. I find myself drawn to that resistance.
What arrests me most is the tension between individuality and collectivity. Each tree is distinct in trunk and primary branching, yet at a certain height the forms entangle becoming a single image. Identity gives way to network. I cannot easily trace a single branch from root to tip without losing it in the thicket of lines. The self becomes porous. In psychological terms, I am reminded of object relations theory and the idea that the self is never fully discrete but always constituted in relation. The trees, though standing apart at their bases, participate in a shared canopy that dissolves strict boundaries.
Here I hear an echo of Hegel’s insistence that “self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another.” Recognition is mutual; identity is relational. These trees, taken together, form something like a visual dialectic. Thesis: the solitary trunk. Antithesis: the encroaching branch of another. Synthesis: the canopy in which separation becomes interdependence. The forest is not a collection of isolated beings but a system of reciprocal acknowledgment.
The work’s medium intensifies this meditation. The woodblock print demands decisiveness. The carved line cannot be endlessly revised; it is committed, cut into the matrix. There is an austerity here that aligns with Japanese aesthetic principles such as ma, the generative power of interval. The white is not background; it is pause. It is breath. The trees stand within silence rather than upon it.
This silence recalls Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous closing proposition in the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The print does not attempt to narrate. It does not moralize. It simply presents. In that restraint, it achieves philosophical force. The image feels less like an argument and more like a clearing. What Heidegger might call a Lichtung, a space in which beings can appear. The narrow vertical opening in the sky becomes, for me, precisely such a clearing. It is tempting to read it symbolically, as transcendence, as an axis mundi, but the work resists overt allegory. The opening is restrained. The sky does not blaze; it breathes.
There is also an unmistakable existential undertone. The trees are bare. No leaves soften the network. We are placed in winter, or perhaps in an eternal late autumn. Albert Camus observed, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Tomioka’s forest embodies this paradox. The apparent barrenness reveals not lifelessness but structure. The absence of foliage exposes complexity. The winter forest is not dead; it is waiting.
In my own life, particularly as I continue to negotiate the tension of being religious but not spiritual, I often feel this stripping away. What remains when the leaves of inherited certainty fall? What is the skeleton of belief once ornament dissolves? Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “the task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.” The naked branches feel like that difficulty. They refuse easy comfort. They demand endurance. Yet they also reveal the intricate architecture that was always there beneath the lushness.
Phenomenologically, the image de-centers me. The repetition of trunks stretches laterally beyond the frame, suggesting continuation. I am not positioned as master of the scene but as participant within it. Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes perception as an intertwining, a “flesh” shared between seer and seen. In Tomioka’s forest, the intertwining is literalized. Branch touches branch; line answers line. I become aware of my own thoughts branching in sympathy. The work does not stand opposite me as object; it envelops me as field.
There is something quietly democratic about the composition. No single tree dominates. The rhythm is steady, almost liturgical. The vertical trunks evoke the columns of a nave; the branches form vaulting ribs overhead. Nature becomes architecture; architecture becomes sanctuary. Blaise Pascal wrote, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” Yet the silence here does not terrify. It steadies. The forest’s repetition creates not dread but humility.
Historically situated in 1961, amid Cold War anxieties and accelerating technological modernity, Trees feels almost monastic in its restraint. It neither rejects modernism nor indulges spectacle. Its modernity lies in reduction: flattened depth, graphic starkness, emphasis on line as structure. Yet its sensibility is ancient. The forest as motif runs through East Asian ink traditions as meditation on impermanence. Here, impermanence is not sentimentalized; it is rendered structural.
What ultimately lingers is the sense that complexity need not be chaotic. The branches interweave without collapsing into disorder. There is hidden coherence. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously contrasted the “arborescent” model of hierarchy with the “rhizomatic” model of multiplicity. Tomioka’s forest intriguingly resists easy categorization. The trunks suggest hierarchy and rootedness; the canopy suggests network and rhizome. The image holds both logics in tension.
As I dwell with the print, I feel less compelled to decode it and more inclined to inhabit it. The trees do not ask to be solved; they ask to be seen. They invite a slowness that is increasingly rare. In that sustained looking, I become aware of my own branching questions, my own entanglements, my own desire for a clearing of white sky at the center of things.
Perhaps that is the quiet philosophical achievement of Tomioka’s Trees: it reveals that the clearing is not elsewhere. It is already within the forest. It appears not by escaping entanglement but by attending to it. The white sky is not the negation of the branches; it is their condition. And so I stand before the image, held between trunk and canopy, solitude and network, winter and promise, aware that what appears spare is in fact inexhaustibly intricate.