Tree trunks and blue sky

"Tree trunks and blue sky" turns to outdoor subject matter, likely depicting vertical trunks pushing upward against an open sky. Onchi's landscape work tended toward semi-abstraction, reducing natural forms to essential masses and broad fields of color. The vertical thrust of tree trunks would have offered him a structural opportunity: dark, grain-textured columns set against the unbroken expanse of sky, the contrast between solid and void organizing the composition. Bokashi gradation may have been used to graduate the blue of the sky, creating atmospheric depth without resorting to pictorial detail. Onchi typically left the woodgrain partly visible in such passages, allowing the natural texture of the block to function as a depictive element — bark conjured by the grain itself rather than carved illustration. Within Onchi's body of work, prints of this kind sit alongside his more thoroughly abstract compositions and connect his sosaku-hanga practice to a long Japanese tradition of attentiveness to natural subjects, while refusing the literal descriptive approach of earlier kacho-e and landscape prints.