Evening glow at sea

This seascape belongs to Kitaoka's category of contemplative coastal scenes, where the horizontal band of water is the structural spine of the composition. Evening light over the ocean is a subject suited to bokashi printing — graduated wiping of pigment on the block — and Kitaoka's prints of this kind typically modulate from a warm vermilion or amber band at the horizon through cooler indigo and grey-blue passages above and below. The dual tagging of seascape and night scene suggests the moment of transition rather than full darkness, when residual sun still warms the water surface. Kitaoka's marine prints reflect a sosaku-hanga sensibility quite distinct from the shin-hanga seascapes of Yoshida Hiroshi or Kawase Hasui: the emphasis is on the pictorial flatness of color planes and the meditative reduction of incident, rather than on optical realism. The work fits within his post-Paris and post-New York period (after 1953 and the 1960s), when international exposure pushed him toward abstracted landscape construction grounded in the disciplined craft of mokuhanga.