Abstract

A non-representational composition produced in the mokuhanga tradition that Kitaoka inherited from his Tokyo School of Fine Arts mentor Hiratsuka Un'ichi but pushed toward the formal vocabulary he absorbed during his postwar stays in Paris and New York. Abstract prints of this kind typically rely on the grain of the cherry or katsura block as an active compositional element, with broad areas of flat ink set against bokashi gradations whose softness comes from working pigment into damp washi with a wide brush before pulling the impression with a baren. Kitaoka's abstract sheets sit firmly within sosaku-hanga practice — the artist designs, carves, and prints the work himself — and they mark his shift away from the social-realist figuration of his Manchurian and early postwar period toward the planar, color-field-influenced idiom that defined his mature output from the late 1950s onward.