Pond

Pond departs from the urban and industrial subjects that dominated Ono's prewar output, turning to a quieter motif of still water — a subject more often associated with shin-hanga landscape painters than with the sosaku-hanga circle. Yet Ono's treatment would have remained graphic rather than atmospheric: blocks carved to read as flat shapes of dark and light rather than as the bokashi gradations of a Hasui twilight. The composition likely reduces reflections, reeds, and bank to a small number of carved planes printed on absorbent washi, with the baren pressure varied by hand to give the pigment its characteristic uneven density. Such subjects appear in Ono's postwar work alongside his continuing interest in workers and townscapes, reflecting the broader sosaku-hanga ethos that any motif — natural or built — was acceptable as long as the artist controlled drawing, carving, and printing himself.