Bird

Another bird from the same series, likely differing in pose or background treatment from its companions. Sosaku-hanga artists often produced birds in series because the motif allowed sustained formal investigation: the silhouette of a bird is reducible without becoming abstract, which suits a printmaking idiom that prizes clear shape and carved contour. Ono's handling typically involves a limited palette — a single dominant color or a black-key block over flat tonal grounds — printed onto absorbent washi that registers the baren's pressure as a faint texture across the field. After the high-contrast urban prints he produced in the 1930s in dialogue with the leftist current of sosaku-hanga, the bird subjects mark a continuation of the same graphic intelligence in different subject matter. The carved line remains direct and unornamented, the kind of mark that records the moment of cutting rather than smoothing it into a decorative finish, consistent with the movement's principle of jiga-jikoku-jizuri — self-drawn, self-carved, self-printed.