Summer landscape

Summer landscape places Kitaoka's work within the seasonal cycle that has structured Japanese landscape art from yamato-e screen painting through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) to twentieth-century [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) and [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga). A summer treatment would call for a deeper green palette than his spring or autumn prints, with the absorbency of washi and the tonal range of [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation allowing distinctions between near and far foliage, sunlit field and shaded grove. Kitaoka's mid- and late-career landscapes tend to reduce topographic incident in favor of structural pattern: a planted rice paddy registering as a parallel ruled field, distant mountains as a flat band, summer vegetation as carved texture. Such compositions reflect his absorption of modernist abstraction during his Paris and New York years while retaining a recognizably Japanese subject and atmosphere. The work belongs to the postwar reformulation of meisho-e in which specific place gives way to seasonal type — summer in Japan rather than a particular locality — produced through the artist-led sosaku-hanga method of personal carving and printing.