Mt. Komagatake

Komagatake — the name shared by several Japanese peaks including the prominent summits in Nagano's Chuo Alps and Hokkaido — appears here as a subject that allowed Kitaoka to move between topographic specificity and abstracted landform. Working within the sosaku-hanga ethos of complete artistic control, Kitaoka would have carved, printed, and published this work entirely himself, selecting washi that suited his intended ink absorption and surface texture. His mountain landscapes tend toward compressed, flattened compositions in which foreground terrain and distant ridgeline are brought into shallow pictorial space, the tonal relationships between snowfield, rock face, and sky resolved through limited palette and precise bokashi rather than linear detail. The choice of a less-canonical mountain over Fuji reflects his interest in regional landscape as subject matter alongside the better-known national icons.