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Apologies for the small image today. I came across it yesterday while perusing a charity Christmas card catalogue at the bus stop. I hope you can squint enough to see it, because I think it’s worth it.

Now and again, an image comes along that just makes my heart skip. This was in the middle of all the usual offerings: angels and cartoon Father Christmases, robins and the three wise men - an image by Kawase Hasui.

Admittedly, I have a particular liking for Japanese woodcuts (and I think it’s clear that they have marked similarities in style to many cartoon strips), but this image in particular just stopped me short, and I sat and looked at it for a long time trying to work out why. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it was full of atmosphere. But how had the artist pulled that off?

Well, for starters, a path leads the eye deep into the picture. Straight away you can imagine yourself walking down that path.

And then, the season and the time of day are both starkly apparent. Famously, Japanese Haiku are supposed to reference the season, and now I see why: the mention of a fleeting time of year will always add a layer of nostalgia or yearning to any art, written or visual. What’s more, snow may be easy to represent visually, but it carries a wealth of sensory baggage with it: the cold, the wetness, the crunch of feet. Equally, twilight tends to be a time of expectation.

Finally, there is a sense of stillness. I’ve written before about trying to represent sound; now here’s an artist representing silence, surely just as difficult a task, but, again, aided by the use of the snow.

I seem to have mentioned Christmas for the second time in two days.. for which, I can only apologise. But if you are similarly enamoured of these cards, you can buy them on the Unicef website, and do some good for charity at the same time.