Three Eyes- oban

Kaoru Saitō (born 1932) works within the sōsaku-hanga tradition, in which the artist controls every stage of production from design through carving and printing. "Three Eyes" is an oban-format print—approximately 38 × 25 cm—and the title suggests a figurative or semi-abstract composition organized around the motif of three eye-like forms. Saitō's work engages with archetypal imagery drawn from the human body, folk religious iconography, and psychological symbolism, treated through abstracted woodblock surfaces that exploit the grain and resistance of the plank as expressive material. Three eyes arranged within a single composition may reference multi-eyed protective deities in Japanese folk religious iconography, or may operate as a formally self-sufficient arrangement of circular forms within the rectangular field. The hand-printed surface of a sōsaku-hanga work reveals the artist's mark directly—the pressure variation of the baren, slight ink bleeding at carved edges—as an expressive dimension absent from the mechanically consistent surfaces of commercial shin-hanga production.