When Lawrence Smith, the Japanese Keeper gave Yoshida a retrospective exhibition at the British Museum, London, in 1993, he became the first living artist ever to be so honoured. This impressive pair of canvases from the late Seventies were part of that comprehensive show. Each work exemplifies Yoshida’s gestural abstractionist style while still paying tribute to the Japanese underpinnings that shine through to illuminate Yoshida’s work of this period. Growing in confidence in his determination to concentrate on the essential aspects of Life (Inochi) in all its complexity, these works are doubly titled, bearing the Japanese title 'Arawareru' – to appear or to manifest – as a secondary indicator of the precise aspect of ‘Life’ (‘Sei-Mei’) under consideration. In his Notebooks from this time, Yoshida wrote: “After reflecting seriously on Life, and considering how to express the root of Life in my paintings, I finally realised that, instead of expressing the ever-changing moments of Life, I should express one immovable aspect of Life itself. After arriving at this insight, I decided to title all my paintings “La Vie (Life)”, and began to apply shapes and colours suitable to this purpose.’ In a nearby passage Yoshida recounts how, having struggled to represent the spiritual aspect of God/Nature (Kami-sama) using ordinary colours alone, he realised that gold, being a metal rather than a pigment, could represent all aspects of the divine. These paintings offer insights into the development of these insights as they relate directly to Yoshida’s mature style. They address in abstracted, figurative terms the manifestation of the life-force (Sei-Mei) itself as an essential element in the grand design of a Divine Providence.