Meadow

Meadow extends Kitaoka's engagement with the Japanese countryside through the [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) method, in which the artist personally designs, carves, and prints the work. The composition likely features expanses of grass or wildflower, with the woodgrain itself contributing texture to the depicted vegetation — a hallmark of mid-century creative prints that used the moku ('wood') in mokuhanga as expressive material rather than concealing it. Kitaoka often worked in horizontal formats for landscape subjects, employing flat planes of color and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations to suggest atmospheric depth. After his immersion in oil painting at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts under Fujishima Takeji, and his subsequent years in Paris and New York, Kitaoka's pastoral subjects increasingly reduced topographic incident in favor of structural pattern. Meadow belongs to a strand of postwar Japanese landscape printmaking that translated traditional yamato-e affection for native scenery into a modern, internationally legible idiom.