In his Notebooks Yoshida wrote: "In the 1950s, while meditating on what I’d taken inside me, trying to find the origin of my thinking, I came to realise that in order to achieve anything, I first needed to establish who I was. When I understood that the colour black absorbed all the other colours, I realised that what I was searching for existed in this blackness. To understand black was to know myself and discover within me an infinite number of elements to express. This has always been the starting point of my art, the basis for capturing, contemplating, and expressing all things."

Several of Yoshida’s early 60s prints bear titles that refer directly to his daily practice of ‘meditation,’ an exercise with which he began and ended each day, and one he always practised before picking up his brushes to begin painting. The black central figure composed of three interconnected oblate spheroids may well refer to the three stages of meditative practice: Dharana or Concentration, Dhyana or Mindfulness and Samahdi, Insight or Realisation. The first stage is a process of grounding one’s thoughts while contemplating the disconnected trains of thought racing through the junctions of the mind. As the breath and heart slow down, one arrives at a place of mindfulness, where one can detach oneself from identifying with the mind’s chatter and focus more clearly on the object of contemplation. The ultimate state is the realisation that whatever we know as ultimate reality is already here and now, that just sitting quietly concentrating on one’s breath is to be fully present in the moment, as one comes to understand that one already is — and that nothing else matters. The beauty of Yoshida’s marvellous formulation of these three interconnected stages is increased by the subtle interplay of shadowy forms half visible throughout the black interior space, perhaps yielding to the sense of a clear, dark lozenge shape, for Yoshida, a still heart, beating at the very centre of the two lower lobes of the figure.