White Fox Fairies 2
- Medium:
- Woodblock print
- Format:
- Oban
- Source:
- Japanese Art Open Database
$500–$3,000. Common prints: $500–$1,000. Key value factors: Okamoto's colorful landscape prints are modestly priced and accessible to beginning collectors.
The second entry in Okamoto's White Fox Fairies series, this [oban](/glossary/oban) woodblock print depicts kitsune, the shape-shifting fox spirits of Japanese folklore. In traditional belief, white foxes are messengers of the rice deity Inari and possess supernatural abilities including the power to assume human form. Okamoto treats this mythology with a romantic rather than fearful sensibility, rendering his fox spirits as beautiful, ethereal beings that inhabit a space between the animal and human worlds. The woodblock medium suits this subject well, as its flat color areas and decisive carved lines can convey both the solidity of physical form and the transparency of supernatural presence. Okamoto's foxes feel like creatures encountered in a dream, vivid yet impossible.
Hebizukai
1932
Color woodblock print; oban
1935
Color woodblock print; oban
1964
Acrylic paint and oil pastel with oiled charcoal and ink over an ink and graphite underdrawing on paper
1964
Color lithograph with relief block and hand coloring; edition 35/36
White Fox Fairies 2 was created by Ryusei Okamoto (岡本隆生).
White Fox Fairies 2 depicts animals.
