Lumberyard

Lumberyard depicts a working timber yard, a subject Ono shared with several of his sosaku-hanga contemporaries who took the spaces of small-scale industry as a recurring motif. Prints of this kind organize the composition around stacked planks, sawn beams, and the rectilinear sheds of the yard, with the strong parallel and diagonal lines of cut timber providing the structural geometry of the image. The black key block would carry the dense linear description of board edges and stack ends, while flatter color blocks supply the warm tan of fresh-sawn wood and the cooler grays of corrugated roofing or surrounding buildings. Visible carving marks across the timber surfaces would echo the actual grain of the lumber depicted, a self-referential quality common in mokuhanga of working subjects. Within Ono's career, Lumberyard sits comfortably alongside the factory and harbor prints, extending his documentation of the labor and materials of Japanese urban and semi-urban life across the decades he worked in the medium.