Face

Created in 1970, this woodblock print in ink and color on paper presents a single face, stripped to its essential features. Kinoshita Tomio returned to the face as a subject throughout his career, treating it not as a portrait of a specific individual but as a universal human marker. This particular iteration, simply titled "Face," offers the subject without qualification or context, inviting the viewer to confront the image of a human countenance at its most direct. The 1970 date places the work over a decade after Kinoshita's earlier face studies, and the intervening years of sustained exploration likely refined his approach, perhaps reducing the features further or experimenting with new color relationships between the face and its background. The woodblock grain contributes texture that gives the face a weathered, lived-in quality that smooth printing surfaces could not achieve.