Altamira - Chicken

Part of Takeda's Altamira series, which appropriates the iconography of Paleolithic cave painting and translates it into mokuhanga. The chicken — a domesticated bird absent from the actual Altamira cave repertoire in Cantabria — signals the deliberate anachronism that drives the series: Takeda extends the silhouette-based pictorial logic of prehistoric image-making to subjects outside its original archaeological record. The print likely relies on a reduced palette and bold keyblock outline, drawing on the contrast between the carved surface and the absorbent [washi](/glossary/washi) ground to evoke the textured wall of a cave. The work sits at the intersection of Takeda's cartooning practice — he received the Bungei-Shunju Cartoon Award in 1976 — and his sculptural training at Tama Art University, both of which inform his attention to economical contour and the printed image as a tactile object. The series situates animal subjects in a flattened pictorial space without ground line or modeling.