City bird

City bird, in this second iteration, returns to a subject Ono explored in more than one composition: an avian figure set within the modern Tokyo environment. Working through a subject across multiple prints was common practice within the sosaku-hanga circle, where each block and each printing was understood as an independent realization of the artist's idea rather than an edition struck from a fixed master. The variations between two treatments of the same theme typically lie in palette, in the cropping or framing of the urban setting, or in the species and posture of the bird itself. The mokuhanga method supports this kind of variation through reductive printing, partial recutting, or alternate inking of the same blocks. Set against Ono's 1930s prints of factory yards and worker-occupied streets, these later urban-bird subjects retain his attentiveness to the textures of Tokyo without the explicit social-documentary intent of the earlier work. The bird substitutes for the human inhabitants of his prewar prints, holding a similar compositional position within a related pictorial structure.