El Capitan: Yosemite National Park, California

Obata spent the summer of 1927 visiting Yosemite with the artists Worth Ryder (1884–1960) and Robert Boardman Howard (1896–1983). This view of El Capitan was based on one of the watercolor sketches Obata made during their stay. During a trip to Japan the following year, he commissioned a Tokyo print publisher to produce a deluxe series of thirty-five woodblock prints that would faithfully reproduce his original watercolor designs. Titled World Landscape Series, the series of prints received much critical acclaim when exhibited in the United States following Obata's return in 1930. In this print, as in many others from the series, Obata rendered the dramatic scenery of Yosemite through simplified, almost abstract forms. He used watercolor tones to define the elements of the scene and to give the sky its lush color, but ink— as in traditional Japanese painting—to describe the landscape's textures: long, smooth strokes for the granite wall, wide and angular strokes for knobby foreground boulders, and dots, scalloped patterns and longer strokes to represent the valley's evergreen trees., Obata spent the summer of 1927 visiting the High Sierras with artists Worth Ryder (1884–1960) and Robert Boardman Howard (1896–1983). Together, they spent countless hours sketching the dramatic scenery of Yosemite National Park. During a trip to Japan in 1928, Obata commissioned a Tokyo print publisher to produce a deluxe series of thirty-five woodblock prints that would faithfully reproduce his original sketches. Titled World Landscape Series, the series received much critical acclaim when exhibited in the United States following Obata’s return in 1930.
In this print, as in many others from the series, Obata rendered the landscape through simplified, almost abstract forms. He used jewel-like tones to define the peaks, the trees and rocks massed at its base, and to give the sky its lush color, but turned to sumi ink to describe the landscape’s textures: long, smooth strokes for the granite wall, wide and angular strokes for knobby foreground boulders, and dots, scalloped patterns, and longer strokes to represent the valley’s evergreen trees.