Nude in Bath

The bathing nude is a recurring subject in Sekino's figure work, where the closed, intimate space of the bath allowed him to explore the human form free from narrative or costume. Influenced by both the Japanese bijin-ga tradition and Western figure drawing acquired through his academic training, Sekino constructed such compositions around the body's silhouette against tiled or steamy enclosures, using minimal line to describe volume. The woodblock medium's capacity for flat color planes and graduated tone through bokashi made it well suited to rendering skin, water, and the warm, vaporous light of a bathhouse. The subject places Sekino in a lineage of twentieth-century artists who treated the female form as an occasion for formal, rather than merely decorative, inquiry.