Goyu, Station Thirty-six
As a teenager, Munakata roamed his native Amomori province sketching the countryside in emulation of his idol, Vincent Van Gogh. In 1928 he first learned how to carve wood and began an exuberant, prodigious career as a woodblock print artist. Munakata’s dynamic, bold, roughly hewn black-and-white compositions emerge out of a spontaneous process in which he carved the block in a single sitting, almost "drawing" the wood with his tools rather than carving it.
In the 1960s, Munakata traveled along the Tōkaidō, the Great Eastern Highway that during the Edo period (1600—1868) linked present-day Tokyo, then the shogunal capital of Edo, with the imperial city of Kyoto. The fifty-three stations along the road were first popularized in a print series done in the nineteenth-century by the print artist Hiroshige. Munakata produced a highly personal account, recording a swiftly changing countryside. Munakata writes:
The impetus was a desire to see the human spirit combined with the genre of the landscape in the woodblock print medium. This is the first time where landscapes have become the chief subject matter of my prints. There is nothing in the prints that does not have origin in my personal experience. Every tree, every blade of grass, the mountains and ocean, the wine and the cloud, the thunder and rain.
