Field

Field likely depicts an agricultural landscape — furrowed earth, sparse vegetation, perhaps a distant farmhouse or a worker bent at labor. In Ono's mokuhanga practice even pastoral subjects retain the graphic flatness and hard-edged contour of his urban work, the cherry block carved to read in broad tonal masses rather than fine line. Compositions of this type tend toward horizontal banding — sky, middle ground, foreground — with the texture of the wood grain (mokume) often left visible across the printed area as part of the surface incident. Though Ono is identified primarily with his industrial Tokyo subjects of the 1930s, throughout his long career he repeatedly returned to the rural landscape as a counterweight, often during the privation years of the war and the immediate postwar period. As a sosaku-hanga artist, Ono designed, carved, and printed his own blocks, and a print titled Field sits within a broader practice that treated the Japanese countryside as labored ground rather than scenic retreat.