b"his printmaking career, thus came from his earliest printmaking experiences with Wendell Black. While neither Columbia nor Snake River is dated, it is clear that they are among Makuuchis earliest extant prints. Pure landscapes are a rare subject in Makuuchis graphics, although many of his early paintings were of natural scenes. Both the size of these prints and the techniques mark them as developmental works. Columbia (fig. 11) is one of few woodcuts in Makuuchi's oeuvre and shows a budding artists attempt to capture the layers of running water and bring form and space to a composition built on planes. By contrast, the diminutive etching Snake River (fig. 12) is built out of texture and fine line and focuses more on the structure of the canyon and moody sky than on the river itself. Here we see Makuuchi exploring the etching process, in which the artist makes fluid and freehanded marks into a waxy coating on a metal plate. When the plate is then bathed in acid, the marks become permanent and printable, capturing the spontaneity of the artists draftsmanship. Although Makuuchi did not often focus on landscape, the sites of these two prints are important, as they speak to his emerging engagement with place and memory. The Snake River runs through Idaho (including Twin Falls) and intoFIGUREColumbia CHECKLIST #2Washington State, where it connects with the Columbia, feeding into the Pacific Ocean. This river system is a primary conduit for the migration of sockeye salmon, a fish that would become Makuuchis frequent touchstone and a symbol of his Northwest heritage. These modest prints soon gave way to more ambitious works in both size and subject. The human figure emerged as a preoccupation, as did the oppressive specter of nuclear destruction. While the threat of nuclear war was on the minds of many Americans during the late 1950s, Makuuchi had a closer connection: members of his mothers extended family had perished in the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima. H Maidens (fig. 13) deftly merges abstraction, figuration, and emo-tional content. The title refers to the so-called Hiroshima Maidenstwenty-five young Japanese women who were brought to New York in May of 1955 to receive plastic surgery for disfiguring wounds sustained when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on their home city on August 6, 1945. Their arrival and presence in the United States became a cause clbre, and newspapers across the country published reports on the progress of their medical treatments. 37In this composition Makuuchi imagines the bomb blast that caused the injuries: out of a deeply textured black background, a running female figure is visible onFIGURE \x0c Snake River CHECKLIST #126"