Pumpkin

This still life sits within the broader kacho-e tradition of plant and seasonal imagery, transposed into Oda's distinctly modernist idiom. The pumpkin — kabocha in Japanese — carries autumnal associations and, within Buddhist iconography, can suggest abundance, fertility, and the ripening fruits of practice, themes consonant with Oda's lifelong synthesis of feminism and Buddhism. A mokuhanga treatment of this subject typically employs a limited palette with flat color fields registered across multiple blocks, with bokashi gradation deployed to suggest the rounded volume of the gourd. Oda's hand-printed editions are characteristically pulled on washi using sumi outlines and water-based pigments worked into the paper with a baren rather than a mechanical press. The subject aligns with the artist's later turn toward agricultural and elemental themes following her relocations from New York to Muir Beach and ultimately to Hawaii Island, where her Ginger Hill Farm functioned as both a working organic farm and a meditation retreat. Where her early prints celebrate goddess archetypes, works like Pumpkin extend that celebration of generative feminine force into the vegetable kingdom.