Born in Tokyo, the eldest son of renowned painter and woodblock print artist Hiroshi Yoshida(1876-1950) and artist Fujio Yoshida (1887-1987), Toshi Yoshida was raised immersed in art. Branching into other media, later generations have continued to burnish the Yoshida family legacy of art.

From as early as the age of three, Toshi Yoshida showed exceptional talent in woodblock print design, amazing and delighting his father. Together father and son traveled widely in East Asia, completing sketching tours of India, Burma, and Ceylon by the time the younger Yoshida was twenty.

After attending the School of the Pacific Arts Association, seeking new subject matter, Toshi Yoshida resumed travels which took him to the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa and Antarctica. Throughout Master Yoshida's world-wide travels he held woodblock print exhibitions and found himself in demand as a speaker. Toshi Yoshida and his wife artist Kiso Yoshida (1919-2005) welcomed young artists from around the world to their studio in Japan.

Inspired by the Mendocino Art Center where he lived and taught in 1971, Master Yoshida founded the Miasa Bunka Center International Hanga Academy in Miasa, Nagano-ken on Japan's main island, Honshu. Since the Bunka Center's founding in 1980, Miasa (now Miasa-Omachi) and Mendocino have been sister cities.

In addition to shin hanga ("new prints"), which draw inspiration from the ukiyo-e woodblock prints of the 18th and 19th centuries C.E., and employ the same traditional production methods, Master Yoshida distinguished himself as a modern sosaku hanga ("creative prints") artist. His images span traditional Japanese cultural subjects, evocative abstract work and powerful depictions of animals in their natural habitats.

As with the work of his father Hiroshi Yoshida, Toshi Yoshida's woodblock prints are not only treasured in Japan, but have an international reputation for excellence, hanging in the permanent collections of the world's leading museums, including the New York Museum of Modern Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

- Carol Goodwin Blick (2008)

Zacha's Bay Window Gallery offers a choice selection of pristine woodblock prints by Toshi Yoshida, a number of them handsigned in pencil, direct from the Yoshida estate in Japan.

Fresh woodblock prints by Toshi Yoshida are few. The Yoshida estate is no longer printing blocksigned posthumous work; decades ago the original blocks became too worn to use. Pristine handsigned woodblock prints by Master Yoshida are even more rare.

When these scarce treasures are gone, they will not be replaced.

MORE ABOUT JAPANESE WOODBLOCK PRINTS

Woodblock Print Terms by J. Noel Chiappa
http://mercury.lcs.mit.edu/~jnc/prints/glossary.html

Shin Hanga & Sosaku Hanga
The shin hanga (literally "new prints") art movement of the early 20th century C.E. in Japan, revitalized traditional ukiyo-e art which had its roots in the 17th through early 19th centuries C.E., maintaining the traditional ukiyo-e collaborative system (hanmoto system) in which the artist, carver, printer and publisher engaged in a division of labor, as opposed to the sōsaku hanga ("creative prints") movement which advocated the principles of jiga ("self-drawn"), jijoku ("self-carved") and jizuri ("self-printed"), in which the artist, with the desire of expressing the self, is the sole creator of art.
- from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

About shin hanga:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shin_hanga

About sosaku hanga:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sosaku_hanga