Kakegawa - Tokaidô

A second composition for the twenty-sixth Tokaido station, this Kakegawa belongs to the same Fifty-Three Stations cycle Sekino worked on between 1960 and 1974. The artist sometimes returned to a single station with different angles, seasons, or palettes, taking advantage of the long horizon of the project. Kakegawa, in modern Shizuoka Prefecture, lay along the inland route past Kakegawa Castle and offered Edo-period travelers a vantage toward the Akiba shrine and, in clear weather, distant Mt. Fuji. As a sosaku-hanga work, the print was designed, carved on cherry blocks, and pulled by Sekino himself on washi, keeping the entire process under one hand in keeping with the movement's founding principles. Bokashi gradations model atmospheric passages while flatter color fields establish architecture and ground plane, the baren-pulled surface registering the matte absorption characteristic of hand-printed mokuhanga. Within Sekino's wider output — which also included portraits, theater subjects, and folk-life scenes from the north — the Tokaido cycle remained his most sustained engagement with the meisho-e tradition.