Cock

A single rooster, a subject that draws on two distinct strands available to a sosaku-hanga artist: the kacho-e bird-and-flower tradition of Edo-period printmaking, and the zodiac iconography associated with the Year of the Rooster, often used for New Year prints. Ono's treatment would be expected to flatten the bird into bold planar shapes — comb, wattle, tail feathers, and body mass each carved as discrete blocks — rather than pursuing the descriptive feather-by-feather rendering of the earlier ukiyo-e kacho-e tradition. The print's interest typically lies in the silhouette and in the contrast between dense black areas of carved line and flat color fields, with the wood grain often allowed to show through lighter passages. As a single-figure animal study, the work sits apart from Ono's industrial and urban subjects of the 1930s and aligns instead with the small-format domestic and seasonal imagery many sosaku-hanga artists produced throughout their careers.