Flowers of Japan

Flowers were a recurring subject for Onchi, treated in a manner closer to modernist still life than to the traditional kacho-e (bird-and-flower) genre that had carried floral subjects through earlier periods of Japanese printmaking. A series under the title Flowers of Japan would gather images organized around plants associated with Japanese seasonal aesthetics — subjects such as camellia, peony, lotus or chrysanthemum — but rendered with the planar simplification and palette restraint that distinguish sosaku-hanga from earlier nishiki-e practice. Onchi's still lifes are often built from a single dominant chromatic interval and a heavily simplified ground, and his carving emphasizes the tactile bite of the knife rather than the precision of the publisher-trained horishi. The artist printed his own editions on washi using hand pressure with the baren, and the modulated saturation visible in his impressions comes from this single-hand practice. Flower subjects gave Onchi a compact testing ground for color relationships outside his architectural and figurative work.