Bird

This impression continues the bird sequence, likely depicting a perched or folded form treated through the simplified vocabulary Ono used for natural subjects after the war. The print's compositional logic descends from the Edo-period kacho-e of artists such as Hiroshige and Koson, but the handling is recognizably twentieth-century: the bird reads as a designed shape rather than an observed creature, with internal articulation reduced to a few carved marks indicating wing or eye. The mokuhanga process here produces a surface where pigment density varies across the printed area, the woodgrain often left visible as a subtle striation through lighter passages. Ono's studio practice — he printed editions himself, by hand, from blocks he had cut — meant impressions varied in inking and registration in ways that distinguish sosaku-hanga from the more uniform commercial shin-hanga prints of Watanabe Shozaburo's workshop. The print belongs to a lineage that valued the trace of process over the polish of reproduction.