Fishing boat and green bird

A composition that pairs a working fishing vessel with a small bird rendered in green, combining the marine subjects of Kitaoka's coastal travel sketches with the [kacho-e](/glossary/kacho-e) tradition of bird-and-flower imagery. The unconventional pairing — a single bird placed in the same pictorial space as a boat, rather than confined to a separate botanical setting — is characteristic of Kitaoka's willingness to override the genre divisions of classical Japanese printmaking. Technically, prints of this kind in his catalogue rely on a small number of carefully overprinted blocks: a dark block for the boat's hull and rigging, a flat color block for the sea, and a smaller, finely carved block for the bird, the green achieved by registering a yellow under a transparent blue or by mixing pigment directly. The unusual color choice for the bird — green rather than the browns or greys of a realistic seabird — signals the print's location in Kitaoka's later, more decoratively keyed work, where local color is set aside in favor of compositional balance between a few resonant flat tones.