Meadow

A pastoral subject standing apart from the factory and street imagery for which Ono is better known, the meadow print suggests an open expanse of grass set against a distant treeline or horizon. In sosaku-hanga practice, the artist asks the block's grain and tool to do much of the descriptive work: a coarse plank or deep gouge registers grass as directional texture across the sheet, while bare washi reads as light. Ono carved and printed his own blocks throughout his career, which gives prints like this a tactile surface where the act of cutting remains visible rather than smoothed away. The meadow theme would have given him room to work in a quieter register than the high-contrast urban prints of the 1930s, and the subject fits a broader postwar turn within the sosaku-hanga movement toward landscape and nature — a redirection visible in the work of Onchi, Hiratsuka, and others alongside whom Ono regularly published.