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](/glossary/washi), sometimes combined with silkscreen, allowing Funasaka to set crisp registered shapes against the softer tonal fields produced by [baren](/glossary/baren)-printed woodblocks. Color is used flatly, without [bokashi](/glossary/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.