Summer Mountain

Summer Mountain places Sasajima's gouge work in the service of dense, hot foliage. The composition likely arranges a single peak or ridge against open sky, with the mountain's bulk built from clustered chisel marks rather than outline drawing -- a sosaku-hanga preference for letting the cut block speak. Summer in Sasajima's work tends toward saturated greens applied with restrained registration, the artist preferring two or three blocks over the elaborate twenty-block schemes of commercial Edo-period nishiki-e. Burnishing pressure from the baren would have varied across the surface to draw differing absorption from the washi, giving the foliage mass an irregular weight. The print sits within Sasajima's broader landscape practice, which ran parallel to his temple subjects and shared their commitment to the artist working every block alone. Trained first as a painter and converted to printmaking under Onchi Koshiro in the late 1930s, Sasajima treated each landscape as a problem of surface and incision rather than perspectival illusion.