Butterflies

This second Butterflies composition, distinct from its similarly titled companion, indicates Sekino returned more than once to the lepidopteran subject, treating it as an occasion for variation in arrangement, scale, and palette rather than as a single fixed image. In sosaku-hanga practice the artist carved and printed each impression himself, so successive treatments of one motif typically explored different block configurations: a closer crop, a different number of insects, alternative ground tones, or shifts in the registration of overlapping color planes. Sekino's mature printing technique combined firm linear cutting with bokashi gradations and occasional embossing or karazuri (blind printing) to model wing surfaces, producing an effect distinct from the flat opacity of much modernist woodcut. Such reworked motifs sit comfortably within his oeuvre alongside repeated views of bridges, temples, and individual sitters, where each iteration sharpens his understanding of the subject's pictorial possibilities and reflects the sosaku-hanga conviction that the print is a finished work of art conceived through the woodblock medium itself, not a reproduction of a prior drawing.