Boy

A single figure of a child rendered in Sasajima's characteristic sumi-heavy manner. Figurative subjects appear sporadically across his five-decade body of work, which was otherwise concentrated on the temples of Nara and Kyoto. The composition isolates the boy against the paper ground, with broad blocks of black ink defining hair and clothing and the chisel marks left visible in the printed surface as a record of the carving process. Sasajima absorbed the sosaku-hanga principle from Onchi Koshiro that the artist must design, carve, and print every block by hand, and he held to this through his entire career. The print is unburdened by setting or narrative incident — the child is read as a compact arrangement of dark and light masses, executed with the same blunt directness as the joinery of a temple beam. Earth pigments, if present at all, are muted and applied sparingly to washi.