Mt.Yotei

Mt. Yotei is the symmetrical stratovolcano in southwestern Hokkaido often called Ezo-Fuji for its resemblance to its larger southern counterpart. Sekino's print likely treats the mountain as a single bold silhouette rising above foothills, fields, or a foreground village, framed in the elongated proportions favored by sosaku-hanga landscape designers. Multi-block woodcut on washi would let the artist build the cone in flat planes of color and use bokashi gradients in the sky to model atmosphere — twilight, snow-haze, or low cloud. Unlike the Edo-period meisho-e tradition that codified place views as souvenirs, Sekino approached mountains as personal subjects within his extensive travel work across Japan's regions. The print extends the line of his landscape series of the 1950s and 1960s, in which he revisited the country's geography through a modernist sensibility shaped by his early study under Onchi Koshiro and his commitment to the self-carved, self-printed creative-print method.