Late autumn

A seasonal landscape from Kitaoka's mature period, Late Autumn treats its subject through the layered color registration that characterizes sosaku-hanga practice. The print likely shows a hillside, grove, or single tree at the moment when foliage has begun to thin, with the kacho-e attention to seasonal change recast in modernist compositional language. Kitaoka exploited the woodblock medium's capacity for flat color shapes overlaid in successive impressions, achieving the russets and ochres of late-autumn foliage through the superimposition of separate keyblocks rather than through painterly blending. The visible grain of the cherry or katsura block often reads as the texture of bark or fallen leaves. Such prints relate to the broader sosaku-hanga interest in landscape as personal observation rather than topographic record — a tradition Kitaoka extended through his decades of teaching and exhibiting in Japan and abroad.