Printer

Printer depicts a craftsperson at work — almost certainly a hanga printer ([surishi](/glossary/surishi)) bent over a low working table, [baren](/glossary/baren) in hand, pressing a dampened sheet of [washi](/glossary/washi) against an inked block. The subject is self-referential: Ono, as a [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) artist, designed, carved, and printed his own work, so an image of a printer is at once an image of his own practice and of the broader trade of Japanese woodblock production. The print likely follows Ono's characteristic high-contrast manner of the 1930s and after — black-and-white or a limited palette, with the figure rendered in stark silhouette and the working tools (baren, brushes, blocks, paper stack) arranged across the picture plane in graphic flatness. Within his wider body of work, Printer belongs to a long-running interest in workers and craftspeople — factory hands, dockworkers, fishermen — that drew on the leftist social consciousness shared with other Onchi-circle artists during the prewar and early postwar decades.