Owl with Flowers

An owl set in proximity to flowers, combining the two motifs that recur most often across Ikuta's catalogue and pairing his signature nocturnal subject with kacho-e floral elements. The print would have been produced by uniformly rocking a copper plate to accept ink as a saturated black, then working back into the burr with scraper and burnisher to draw the owl's body, eyes, and the petals of the surrounding blossoms out of the dark field. The owl's plumage in particular benefits from mezzotint's capacity for soft, feathered tonal transitions, while the flower forms read as luminous patches lifted from the same dark ground. The 2005 date situates the work within a productive run of mid-decade owl images. Where his solitary owl portraits treat the bird as a self-contained nocturnal presence, the introduction of flowers here ties the composition more directly to the bird-and-flower lineage of Japanese print imagery, mediated through his self-taught intaglio practice.