Lighthouse

A mokuhanga depicting a coastal lighthouse, likely rendered with the planar geometric reduction characteristic of Ono's mid-career sosaku-hanga work. The lighthouse subject lent itself to Ono's preferred vocabulary of stark vertical mass set against horizontal sea and sky bands, where the structural silhouette can be carved as a single bold shape and surrounded by graded bokashi tones for atmosphere. Ono typically worked the block surface to leave visible knife marks and grain texture, treating the wood not as a neutral matrix but as a participating material — a core sosaku-hanga conviction that the artist should carve and print personally rather than delegate to specialists. Lighthouse subjects appeared periodically in Ono's catalogue from the 1950s onward, paralleling the postwar shift in his work from the overtly leftist factory and worker imagery of the 1930s toward quieter coastal and industrial-landscape themes that retained his graphic discipline without the polemical edge of his prewar production.