Picking the Seeds of Grass

The title points to a scene of rural labor—figures stooped in a field gathering grass seed, an unsentimental glimpse of agrarian work tied to the seasonal rhythms of the Japanese countryside. Sekino's folk-subject prints from the postwar period typically pair a flattened pictorial space with broadly massed color areas, the texture of the washi reading through pigment hand-applied with a baren. Within the sosaku-hanga movement, he adhered to the jiga-jikoku-jizuri ideal—designing, carving, and printing each block himself—a workflow that permitted irregular impressions and subtle bokashi gradations not possible in atelier production. Such genre subjects sit alongside his theater portraits, his series after the Tokaido, and his Kyoto temple imagery within a broad practice that returned repeatedly to the working life of provincial Japan, an interest grounded in his upbringing in agricultural Aomori.