Seaview

A coastal landscape, a category Sekino addressed periodically across his career alongside his more sustained portrait and Tokaido projects. Marine subjects in mokuhanga have a long lineage stretching back through Hokusai's sea-themed compositions and the meisho-e tradition of celebrated views, and twentieth-century sosaku-hanga artists frequently revisited the genre to test the medium's capacity for rendering water, sky, and horizon with limited means. Sekino's typical handling of such subjects relies on flat, broadly cut color planes for sea and sky, with bokashi used to soften horizons or model wave troughs, and economical line work reserved for shoreline rocks, vessels, or distant land masses. As with all of his work, the print would have been designed, carved, and pulled by the artist himself, in keeping with the sosaku-hanga commitment to unified authorship of the printed image from initial drawing through the final baren-pulled impression.