Abstract

Kitaoka's abstract prints emerged through the 1960s and 1970s alongside his continuing landscape practice, the two modes informing one another rather than forming a sequence. The works draw on the material vocabulary of mokuhanga itself: the mottled grain of carved blocks, registered overlaps of pigment, the tactile bite of color driven into [washi](/glossary/washi) by the [baren](/glossary/baren). Color fields are layered rather than bounded, with wood grain often deliberately exposed so that the surface reads as both image and substrate. The approach reflects his exposure to American and European postwar abstraction during his time in New York and Paris in the 1950s and 1960s, while the print methods remain anchored in [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) conventions—self-carved blocks, water-based pigments, hand-rubbed impressions on Japanese paper. As a work without descriptive title, the print directs attention to surface, registration, and the rhythm of carved marks rather than to subject.