Swans in the lake

A bird-and-water composition that updates the kachō-e tradition through sosaku-hanga means: rather than the decorative outlining and graded washes of Edo-period bird prints, swans are reduced to flat white shapes carved as reserves in the block, their forms defined by the surrounding printed water rather than by drawn contour. Kitaoka frequently composed such scenes with a high horizon or no horizon at all, treating the lake surface as an all-over field within which the birds float as compositional accents. Bokashi is typically used to suggest depth in the water without breaking the flatness of the picture plane. Swan and waterfowl subjects connect this print to a long lineage running from Hiroshige's Edo-period kachō sheets through Ohara Koson's Meiji-era reinterpretations to the more austere modernist treatments of Kitaoka's twentieth-century contemporaries.