Stone Mountain, Atlanta

Stone Mountain, the granite monadnock east of Atlanta, is a subject Kitaoka could only have undertaken because of his American residency in the 1960s, and the print stands as direct visual evidence of his transpacific working life. The dome's distinctive bare-rock profile, rising abruptly from surrounding pine forest, suits mokuhanga's economy of large flat planes: the mountain itself reads as a single carved block of grey or warm-grey pigment, set against the deeper greens of the Georgia piedmont. Kitaoka likely used bokashi to model the dome's curvature subtly, with sharper carved edges defining its silhouette against the sky. The choice of an American geological landmark as a Japanese woodblock subject is itself a sosaku-hanga statement — print as the artist's own observation rather than as a fixed traditional repertoire. Together with his New York and other American prints, Stone Mountain documents a midcentury Japanese printmaker treating the United States as legitimate subject matter on equal footing with Kyoto temples and Japanese coastlines.