My Landscape A-6-90

For Koyama the screenprint is the catalyst for delving into his own feelings and communicating his response to what inspires and excites him. His subject is landscape, specifically the dry river landscape near where he now resides in Saitama Prefecture. Koyama photographs this landscape himself, entrusting his body to nature, responding to the breezes through the grasses
and the light reflected from the sparkling clouds

After he has printed a photograph, he mentally breaks it down into its component colours. He then produces his prints by layering veils of the colour over his original photograph thus transforming the landscape photograph into a unique image. Each application of colour transforms and personalises the original even more, akin to religious homage as he seeks to articulate through each layer his own heart, his own instincts, probing his response to the landscape. The objectivity of the photographed landscape is personalised through the almost painterly layers of abstraction, and the viewer's cognitive faculties are challenged by the plurality of the work. The transmission poles that are a fixed feature of his serially titled landscapes reinforce the metaphor of invisible electromagnetic fields transmitting the as yet unspoken and unseen.

Koyama was born in Okayama Prefecture, educated at the Sokei Academy of Fine Arts and has participated in many print exhibitions.

Jackie Menzies, Contemporary Japanese Prints: The Urban Bonsai, 1992, pg. 60.