Kiyomizu in Golden Autumn

A second treatment of Kiyomizu-dera, this time set within the koyo of late autumn, when the maples around the temple's hillside platform turn through ochre, vermilion, and rust. Sekino's autumn prints generally rely on broad blocks of warm color set against the darker timber of temple architecture, with bokashi gradation suggesting shifts of light through the foliage. Hand-applied impression with a baren on absorbent washi gives the pigment a matte, slightly granular surface absent from offset reproduction. As a sosaku-hanga artist, Sekino carved and printed each block himself, a workflow visible in the irregularities of inking. Returning to a single Kyoto subject across seasons placed him within an older meisho-e tradition that Hiroshige had developed in the nineteenth century, while the bold tonal massing belongs unmistakably to the modernist idiom of the postwar creative-print movement.