Nautilus shells

Nautilus Shells represents the still-life and natural-form subjects that emerge in Kitaoka's later, more abstract output. The chambered spiral of the nautilus — with its logarithmic geometry and pearlescent interior — gave sosaku-hanga printmakers a subject that could be carried between observed naturalism and pure pattern. The print likely arranges one or more shells against a contrasting ground, with the spiral structure rendered through careful registration of curved key-block lines and graduated color. Bokashi is well suited to the pearlescent gradients of the inner shell, while the visible grain of the cherry block can substitute for the calcified texture of the outer wall. By the period of such work, Kitaoka had absorbed influences from his Paris and New York years, and natural forms in his hands tend toward the structural and abstract rather than the descriptive — relating to a wider twentieth-century interest in shells, fossils, and crystals as armatures for composition.