Cherries and lemon

Cherries and lemon belongs to a substantial group of Funasaka prints in which the lemon — one of his three signature motifs alongside the hole and the vertical mark — anchors a quasi-still-life composition. The pairing of cherries with the lemon flattens conventional fruit imagery into geometric counters: the lemon's almond silhouette and the cherries' paired circles function as compositional units rather than naturalistic studies. Such works are typically printed as mokuhanga on washi, sometimes combined with silkscreen, allowing Funasaka to set crisp registered shapes against the softer tonal fields produced by baren-printed woodblocks. Color is used flatly, without bokashi gradation, foregrounding the contour and silhouette of each form. Funasaka returned to the lemon for over four decades after first introducing it in the late 1960s, treating it as a fixed sign whose meaning shifts with each new compositional context. Cherries and lemon thus reads less as a depiction of fruit than as an arrangement of personal symbols, consistent with his self-described approach of working through a small, recurring vocabulary across more than a thousand prints.