Winterscene

A snowbound landscape rendered in the sosaku-hanga idiom Kitaoka refined across his postwar decades, in which the artist served as designer, carver, and printer of a single vision. Winter compositions in his catalogue typically reduce form to broad zones of unprinted washi standing in for snow, set against deeply inked passages of bare branches, eaves, or distant ridgelines. The print likely employs bokashi gradation across sky and snowfield to suggest cold, low light without resorting to drawn detail, with the baren pressure varied to leave faint planar texture in the white expanses. Kitaoka frequently worked from sketches gathered on travel through Tohoku and Hokkaido, and his winter scenes draw on that documentary impulse while resolving into pared compositions in the manner of Hiratsuka Un'ichi, his teacher at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Such works sit at the meeting point of mid-century Japanese landscape printmaking and the more reduced, near-abstract designs Kitaoka pursued after his Paris and New York years, where representational subject is held only by a few decisive shapes.