The grass has the warm, matted nap of an animal's winter coat, and it fills the lower half of the frame like bedding thrown across a hill. Out of it rise bare trees, a tall straight one at the left holding itself apart, a huddle of others at the centre, and among them a slender trunk come loose and leaning its whole weight into its neighbours. The sky is a soft, exhausted grey, and the light is the diffuse, shadowless kind that touches everything evenly and flatters nothing.
There is a body here even without a figure. The leaning tree reads as a limb, a spent gesture, the bark peeled back where the trunk has split. Hido finds in this hillside the tenderness he brings to his interiors, an attention to skin and surface, to how things look when no one is composing themselves for the camera. The intimacy is real; the hill has been undressed by the season.
Made for Excerpts from Silver Meadows and printed as an archival pigment on Dibond, the picture keeps its muted palette close, browns and greys pressed almost to touch. It is quiet in the way a room is quiet after someone has left it. What lingers is less the melancholy of winter than the physical fact of the grass, the branches, the lean of the dying tree against the living ones, warm bodies holding one another up.
The grass has the warm, matted nap of an animal's winter coat, and it fills the lower half of the frame like bedding thrown across a hill. Out of it rise bare trees, a tall straight one at the left holding itself apart, a huddle of others at the centre, and among them a slender trunk come loose and leaning its whole weight into its neighbours. The sky is a soft, exhausted grey, and the light is the diffuse, shadowless kind that touches everything evenly and flatters nothing.
There is a body here even without a figure. The leaning tree reads as a limb, a spent gesture, the bark peeled back where the trunk has split. Hido finds in this hillside the tenderness he brings to his interiors, an attention to skin and surface, to how things look when no one is composing themselves for the camera. The intimacy is real; the hill has been undressed by the season.
Made for Excerpts from Silver Meadows and printed as an archival pigment on Dibond, the picture keeps its muted palette close, browns and greys pressed almost to touch. It is quiet in the way a room is quiet after someone has left it. What lingers is less the melancholy of winter than the physical fact of the grass, the branches, the lean of the dying tree against the living ones, warm bodies holding one another up.