The newest print in my series Edo Sumi Hyaku Shoku (A Hundred Shades of Ink of Edo) will be on sale shortly: entitled Utamaro No Shunga, it is an image of a young girl tattooed with an erotic design by Utamaro, the great late-18th century artist of beauties, derived from his album e-honKomachi Biki, while the cartouche design comes from his famous Utamakura album. The art of tattooing in Japan has evolved, some might say declined, a great deal since the Edo period, and as many people have rightly pointed out, young ladies would be highly unlikely today to decide to have a large design placed on their backs like this, but this whole series is a work of the imagination, and plodding reality must be replaced with the romanticism of the image, and I hope we can suspend our disbelief long enough to appreciate the idea of the lovely young woman tattooed with a great master's work.As before in this series, the edition will be 100, and the image size is 38 x 26cm, on paper approximately 42 x 29cm, and will be the same price as other prints in this series. I have used metallic pigments and lacquer detailing in the hair, and this time the seal, which spells 'Paul Binnie' in stylised form, is in the shape of a butterfly, recalling Puccini's beautiful heroine.Certain collectors will know that the blocks were used for a small edition of this design without tattoo, which is being distributed exclusively by my Dutch dealer, Eric van den Ing of Saru Gallery, in quite a different colour scheme, and called Engawa, after the veranda upon which she is sitting.In the future there will be a second female design in this series, Harunobu No Furo, with a young woman bathing, and showing a tattoo of a mid-18th century beauty doing the same in a bathtub while Hokusai No Taki will be based on Hokusai's famous Waterfalls series, and will be a male tattoo subject appearing later this year.
