August Morning glories

August Morning Glories belongs to Sekino's occasional engagements with kachô-e, the bird-and-flower genre that long predated the sôsaku-hanga movement but which modern printmakers like Sekino, Munakata, and Yoshida adapted to a personal, non-commercial idiom. The morning glory (asagao) is a classic subject of late summer in the Japanese poetic calendar, prized for the brevity of each blossom, which opens at dawn and wilts within a day. Sekino's treatment, executed in mokuhanga on washi, would typically reduce the plant to a few flat color shapes — saturated indigo or violet flowers, broad leaves in a subdued green — set against an unmodulated ground, with the woodgrain perhaps allowed to show through as quiet texture. The composition departs from Edo-period kachô-e by avoiding fine outline detail in favor of bold, almost graphic massing, an approach indebted to early twentieth-century European printmaking that Sekino absorbed alongside his commitment to traditional materials and tools, including the baren.