Rice Weeding

Departing from Ohno Bakufu's natural history prints, Rice Weeding depicts the rural agricultural labor of tending flooded paddy fields, a subject with roots in the genre painting tradition. The composition likely shows figures bent in the characteristic posture of hand-weeding between rows of young rice plants, their forms reflected in the shallow standing water of the paddy. Ohno's precise draftsmanship, developed through decades of natural history work, would bring close attention to the textures of saturated earth, the upright green shoots of rice, and the working clothing of the farmers. The print may employ a restricted palette of greens, ochres, and cool blues to convey the atmosphere of the paddy season. Unlike his fish prints, which isolate subjects against plain grounds, a landscape-format agricultural composition would allow Ohno to address aerial recession and the broad horizontal geometry of the rice field — a different test of compositional and technical skill within the woodblock medium.