Buddhas

Buddhas likely depicts a grouping of carved devotional figures — possibly stone jizo, temple sculpture, or roadside Buddhist imagery commonly encountered in the Japanese countryside. Such subjects appear across the careers of postwar sosaku-hanga artists including Saito Kiyoshi, Mori Yoshitoshi, and Kitaoka himself, who treated religious sculpture as forms with quiet silhouettes well suited to the woodblock medium. Compositionally, the print probably arranges multiple figures in a rhythmic row or cluster, with the carved contours of the block echoing the carved stone of the depicted statuary. Kitaoka's training under Hiratsuka Un'ichi at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts emphasized expressive line and the integrity of the carved surface, both relevant to a subject defined by the worn edges of weathered stone. The reduction of facial features to a few decisive cuts is consistent both with the simplification typical of sosaku-hanga and with the actual appearance of folk Buddhist sculpture, where centuries of weather and devotional touching have softened original detail.