Man and carver

Sekino had a sustained interest in craftspeople and working figures, and a print titled Man and Carver almost certainly depicts a horishi, the specialist block-carver whose chisel work translates the artist's drawing into the cherry-wood key and color blocks of mokuhanga. The subject carries a pointed self-reference for a sosaku-hanga artist: the movement's founding principle was jiga, jikoku, jizuri — self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed — so depicting a separate carver acknowledges the older hanmoto division of labor that sosaku-hanga deliberately collapsed. Compositionally such a scene typically isolates the carver at his low workbench, hands and tools foregrounded, with the half-cut block as a secondary focal point. Sekino would have used a strong key-block contour to register the tendons of the working hands and the grain of the cherry block, with quiet color blocks for clothing and floor. The print sits with his other portraits of artisans as documentation of techniques he himself practiced and saw disappearing.