Bean Flowers

A botanical study of bean-plant blossoms, part of the still-life and plant subjects that run alongside Ikuta's owl imagery. The flowers — likely small, papery, and pale — would be drawn out of the inked plate by burnishing back the rocker-laid burr, so the petals read as scraped highlights emerging from the velvety dark field rather than as drawn lines on a light page. This tonal-from-dark logic is fundamental to mezzotint and to Ikuta's compositional vocabulary, in which a few luminous forms are isolated against a saturated ground. The bean plant is an unusual subject in Japanese print tradition, where azalea, plum, peony and chrysanthemum dominate kachō-e iconography, and this choice reflects the personal, observational quality of Ikuta's still-life work — small kitchen-garden subjects rendered with the same nocturnal seriousness as his owls. The 2001 date sits within the productive early-2000s run that established his international reputation, particularly among collectors of contemporary Japanese intaglio.