Rainy day

Rain has a long history as a printmaking subject in Japan, from Hiroshige's diagonal lines in Shono and Ohashi atake no yudachi to later sosaku-hanga reinterpretations, and Kitaoka's treatment belongs to the latter tradition of adapting an Edo-period motif through mid-twentieth-century formal sensibilities. Depicting rain on woodblock typically requires either fine parallel keylines carved into the block to suggest the angle of the downpour or a tonal bokashi laying a wash of grey-blue across the scene to register atmospheric humidity. Kitaoka's wider body of work, which spans social-realist documentation, urban scenes, and abstract landscape, includes a consistent attention to weather and light as the structuring elements of a composition. The print would have been carved and printed by the artist himself, in keeping with the sosaku-hanga doctrine that distinguished the movement from the publisher-driven shin-hanga school working concurrently in Japan.