Vibrant Autumn Reflections of Mount Fuji — Print & Oil Painting

A band of pure orange has been laid across the sky behind the mountain, running edge to edge just above the snow line, and it changes the reading of everything. Above it the picture is blue, white and cold. Below it the picture turns warm. The device is entirely artificial and it works.

Mount Fuji sits centre frame, its cone built from short vertical strokes of white and slate left standing in ridges. A strip of water runs across the middle distance carrying a broad band of reflected light, more glare than mirror, so the reflections of the title are a matter of brightness on the surface rather than a second mountain underneath.

The foreground is worked in heavily loaded strokes: yellow-green fields, a dirt path curving in from the bottom edge, a small dark timber hut on the left, and a tall autumn tree on the right whose orange canopy fills the top corner and answers the band in the sky.

The knife is used almost throughout, and up close the surface becomes a relief map of ridges and pockets. Part of our Japan collection, next to another autumn view of the same peak and the version looking past a thatched roof.