A Greate Image of Buddha in Kamakura

A Great Image of Buddha in Kamakura, an undated woodblock by Okuyama Gihachiro (1907-1981), depicts one of the most recognizable monuments in Japanese religious art - the thirteenth-century bronze Daibutsu of Kotoku-in temple - through the artist's mature [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) (creative print) idiom. Seated in deep meditation, the colossal Amida Buddha has been a subject of devotional pilgrimage and pictorial representation for centuries, and Okuyama enters that long tradition while reworking it in fully twentieth-century terms. The composition organizes the sheet around the bronze form as a weighted, frontal mass, its rounded contours and inward-turned features registered through bold, firmly bounded color planes rather than fine line drawing. The dramatic perspective characteristic of Okuyama's work - here a low angle that emphasizes the towering scale of the seated figure - gives the print a graphic power well suited to the colossal subject. A self-taught printmaker from Akita who became one of the few Tohoku-region figures in the predominantly Tokyo-and-Kyoto sosaku-hanga scene, Okuyama designed, carved, and printed the work himself, in keeping with the movement's foundational principle that each impression be a personal act rather than reproductive labor. The Japanese Art Open Database, through [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e).org, preserves this impression as part of a broader record of Okuyama's catalogue (https://ukiyo-e.org/image/jaodb/Gihachiro_Okuyama-No_Series-A_Greate_Image_of_Buddha_in_Kamakura-00031384-021012-F06). For students of Okuyama Gihachiro, the Kamakura Daibutsu print demonstrates how the artist could absorb one of the most overdetermined subjects in Japanese visual culture into his bold-color, dramatic-perspective vocabulary, treating the great bronze not as a relic to be reverently diagrammed but as a sculptural mass fully equal to his Akita festival scenes in graphic weight.