Lavender Flower Basket

A still-life arrangement of lavender stems gathered in a basket, executed in mezzotint and combining Ikuta's botanical interests with the still-life format. The lavender's small, repetitive florets pose a particular challenge for the medium, and would have been drawn out of the dark ground through careful, localized scraping and burnishing, with the basket's woven texture rendered through the directional play of light against the burr. The 2006 dating places the print within the period when fruit, flower, and basket compositions appeared more frequently in his catalogue alongside the birds and owls. The dual tagging of the work — Birds & Flowers and Still Life — reflects the way his floral subjects sit between the kacho-e tradition of seasonal botanical observation and the European still-life convention of arranged objects on a surface. The composition treats the lavender at close range, isolated against the saturated dark ground that functions as the constant atmospheric setting of his intaglio practice.