Green poplars

A stand of poplars, a tree more associated with Hokkaido, the high country of central Honshu, and the European landscape than with the canonical sites of Edo-period printmaking — its appearance in Kitaoka's catalogue reflects the broader subject range opened up to postwar sosaku-hanga artists by travel and by the example of Western modernist landscape painting. Kitaoka's tree studies typically reduce trunk and foliage to two or three blocks: a vertical block for the pale, banded trunks, a denser block for the canopy massed as flat green, and often a ground block carrying a different green for grass or undergrowth. The gradation between these greens, achieved by mixing pigment on the block before pulling, allows depth without illusionistic modeling. The composition sits within the modern Japanese print tradition of treating a single botanical subject — kacho-e in its broadest sense — at the scale and seriousness that Edo-period printmakers reserved for figures or famous places, a shift that ran through the work of Munakata Shikō and Saitō Kiyoshi as well.