Trees

The third Trees print extends Sasajima's serial engagement with arboreal subjects — a pattern of returning, refining, and reworking that echoed his obsessive returns to specific Nara and Kyoto temple complexes. The image handles the subject as a problem of carved line and chromatic mass, with trunks and branches translated into the chiseled vocabulary the artist developed across five decades of sosaku-hanga practice. Where prewar shin-hanga workshops divided labor among designer, carver, and printer, Sasajima held to the creative-print principle absorbed from Onchi Koshiro: every stage by his own hand. The cherry-block grain, the registration marks of multiple impressions, the thickness of washi paper — all become formal elements in their own right rather than incidents of production. As a third variant on the same subject, the print rewards attention to small differences in carving rhythm, color register, and compositional weight relative to its companions.