Garden

A Japanese garden subject, likely structured around the standard elements of stone arrangement, raked gravel, clipped plantings, or a section of pond edge, reduced to flat overlapping shapes in the manner consistent with postwar [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) landscape practice. Garden views suit mokuhanga particularly well because the formal vocabulary of a designed Japanese garden — silhouettes of pine, blocks of moss, clearly bounded paths and stones — already aligns with the planar logic of the woodblock. Ono would have carved each block himself and printed by hand with a [baren](/glossary/baren) on [washi](/glossary/washi), with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations available for sky, water, or shadowed ground. The print likely shows visible knife marks at outline edges and deliberate grain in larger color fields, both treated as legitimate pictorial features rather than flaws. Garden subjects place this work within the contemplative, traditional-Japanese strain of Ono's later production, distinct from the leftist urban prints of his 1930s output around the Ichimoku-kai group.