The largest, Dawn, is a sweeping inkscape blooming in rich colors of deep azure, glowing pink, and radiant gold. Apart from the clusters of silhouetted pine trees, this large work is nearly abstract in its composition. Painted in 1999, Dawn is a culmination of Araki's prolific and experimental artistry. In this latter phase of his life, he explored different materials for painting such as minerals and natural pigments, perhaps as a nod to the nihonga tradition, but which he reimagined with Chinese settings and landscape elements.

Dawn also threads an unmistakable line to his mentor and great traditionalist Chinese painter Zhang Daqian (1899-1983), whose own late-career paintings utilized a "splashed-ink-and-color" technique that recalled medieval Chinese ink painting methods and which he ingeniously embraced as his ageing eyesight began to fail. At once ancient and modern, Araki's painting reveals that his close study of Zhang's techniques led to more than a mere re-creation of his mentor's style. After the closure of his design studio and the death of Zhang, Araki became more interested in establishing his artistic identity and "laying the groundwork for his own legacy," curator Aaron Rio writes in the catalogue that accompanied Boundless Peaks: Ink Paintings by Minol Araki, the 2017 Minneapolis Institute of Art exhibition.

Mountain Under the Moon, by contrast, does not utilize the splashed-ink technique, as seen in Dawn, which Araki had been experimenting with for decades. As he grew older, Araki became increasingly interested in exploring Japanese painting styles, materials, and techniques. Establishing an artistic connection to his Japanese heritage grew more important and perhaps more urgent as he entered the last phase of his life. Similar to Dawn, however, the peaks depicted here are of Chinese origin; most probably the landscape is inspired by Yangming Mountains. This painting includes many of Araki's signature elements, such as the block-like mountain shapes and the "ghostly" trees in the foreground. Though the crescent moon appears enshrouded in nighttime clouds, ribbons of light illuminate the trails down and between the slopes. The enigmatic glow from these pathways create gradients of inky midnight blues and blacks up the hillsides. The unusual sources of light enable Araki to showcase his skills with ink and brush, as the abstracted cluster of peaks resolve from a seeming monochrome nighttime scene through subtle colorations brought out with his delicate touch. A scattering of mica and mineral pigments lends the star-filled sky a twinkling quality.

A large, two-panel work of similar composition from the same period is in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  

A standout within Araki's oeuvre, the Fire Island series may reveal the most personal glimpse of the artist. His subject matter in his middle age had so far ranged from still life and fruit and birds to portraits and nudes and even to monumental landscapes and nature scenes. Much has been made of his inspiration from the literati ink painting tradition and of the mentorship of modern master Zhang Daqian. The Fire Island pictures, however, intimate in both subject and scale, are a departure from such classical precedents. At once thoughtful and heartfelt, these have the plein air feel of an artist on a shore with sketchpad and a few colors at hand. The dramatic diagonals of sun-streaked sky and cloud bands merging with rolling ocean waves recall some of the less tempestuous works of sea and sky by Turner. Characteristic of Araki, botanic elements are carefully rendered in the foreground – long grasses in this instance, instead of trees.

The Fire Island works are "the painter at his most intimate and unguarded, thinking visually, reflecting, almost unconsciously recording through his brush the visual experiences of a life of close observation and deep reflection," writes Richard Barnhart in the 1999 Phoenix Art Museum retrospective exhibition catalogue. "Araki here seems to me to come closest to a purely personal and relatively unmediated engagement with the making of images."

Contrasted with this unfurling landscape is a smaller river scene from 1978, which was during a particularly prolific period for the artist marked by fearless experimentation and creativity. Mountain Lake and Boat dates to this time between 1978 to 1980 when he was as likely to produce portraits of figures and strange birds as gestural abstractions. Despite his experimental impulses, Araki always returned to the subject of landscapes. This earlier example shows a clear influence of his study of Chinese painting, with an expansive use of negative space that lends the traditional scene a distinctly modern feeling.