Etching

This work departs from Sekino's primary medium of mokuhanga and represents his parallel practice in intaglio. Sekino took up etching in the 1930s and continued to produce copperplate work alongside his woodblock prints throughout his career—an unusual breadth for a sōsaku-hanga artist of his generation. Etching offered a different graphic vocabulary: fine cross-hatching, tonal aquatint passages, and the dense modeling of form through line, in contrast to the flat planar color of his woodblocks. The technique involves drawing through a wax ground onto a copper plate, biting the exposed lines in acid, inking the recessed lines, and printing under the pressure of a roller press onto dampened paper. Sekino's etchings engage portraiture and architectural subjects with the same compositional rigor as his woodblocks but exploit the medium's capacity for tonal nuance and small-scale precision. The work reflects the broader sōsaku-hanga commitment to printmaking as autonomous artistic expression rather than reproductive craft.