Early spring in Tsumekisaki

Tsumekisaki is the southernmost cape of the Izu Peninsula in Shizuoka Prefecture, a basalt headland of black cliffs above the Pacific known for early-blooming narcissus fields that flower from late December into March. Kitaoka's coastal landscapes of this kind typically separate the composition into firm horizontal registers: dark cliff or rock mass, sea, and sky, each carried by a single block keyed in flat color with localized bokashi at the horizon and along the surf line. Early spring as a subject would justify the inclusion of the narcissus belt as a pale field along the cliff edge, printed from a finely cut block to suggest the massed flowers without individual rendering. The print belongs to the strain of Kitaoka's later work that documents specific Japanese sites in the meisho-e lineage while retaining the planar, near-abstract construction he had developed abroad. Izu and the Pacific coast were sketching grounds he returned to repeatedly across the 1960s and 1970s.