Yukiyama no takekaba 雪山の岳樺 Birch in snowy mountains

The title — yukiyama (snow mountain) and takekaba, a high-altitude birch native to subalpine zones in Honshu and Hokkaido — locates the print within Kitaoka's mature engagement with Japanese landscape. White birch against snow presents a particular problem for the woodblock printmaker: rendering pale trunks and branches against a white ground without losing them to the paper. Solutions typically involve careful key-block carving for trunk silhouettes, embossing through karazuri (blind printing), and bokashi shading at trunk edges and in the snow shadows. Kitaoka, who studied under Hiratsuka Un'ichi at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts, inherited the sosaku-hanga commitment to the artist as carver and printer, and prints of this kind reflect his interest in the abstract patterning latent in natural subjects — vertical trunk lines functioning almost as a grid laid across the field of snow.