Bird

The seventh bird in the series likely extends the formal language Ono developed for this subject — pared contour, deliberate placement, restrained palette. Birds had served as a recurring motif across Japanese woodblock printing for two centuries before Ono took them up, from the kacho-e of the late Edo period through the meticulous bird studies of Ohara Koson and Watanabe Seitei in the early twentieth century. Ono's contribution sits on the sosaku-hanga side of that lineage rather than the shin-hanga side: the print is conceived, carved, and printed by the artist as a unified act of authorship rather than realized through the division of labor that produced earlier kacho-e. The bird is rendered as graphic shape, not ornithological specimen. The mokuhanga surface — pigment absorbed into washi, the sheet bearing the pressure of the baren — preserves the handmade evidence that distinguishes the movement's output from mechanical reproduction, even when the imagery itself recalls older traditions.