Bridge

A mokuhanga study of a bridge structure, a recurring subject in Ono's urban-industrial vocabulary. Bridges held particular significance within his prewar and postwar work as emblems of Tokyo's modern infrastructure — sites where steel girders, rivets, and engineered geometry intersected with the everyday movement of workers and residents. Prints of this kind typically deploy the high-contrast black-and-white treatment that defined Ono's graphic identity within the sosaku-hanga movement: bold negative space, angular cuts that exploit the resistance of the cherry block, and a compressed tonal range that owes more to European expressionist printmaking than to traditional ukiyo-e. As a self-carving, self-printing artist working within the sosaku-hanga (creative print) tradition, Ono pulled impressions himself with a baren on washi, treating the print as the original artwork rather than a reproduction. The bridge motif aligns with his broader documentary interest in the constructed environment of twentieth-century Japan, an interest he sustained from the 1930s leftist scenes of factory life through his postwar urban observations.