Rising tide

The title "Rising tide" points to a coastal or marine subject — the swell of water moving toward shore, or the moment before a wave breaks. As a sosaku-hanga practitioner, Ono would have carved and printed the work himself, applying the baren by hand to washi. Bokashi (graduated ink wash) is the technique most suited to rendering moving water in mokuhanga, letting the printer suggest the density and translucence of a wave through controlled blending on the block. By the time Ono produced his mature landscape and nature subjects, his formal vocabulary had shifted away from the stark high-contrast black-and-white compositions of his 1930s factory and worker prints toward more lyrical handling. A water study like this sits within that later vein, applying the directness of sosaku-hanga carving — visible grain, deliberate edges, restricted palette — to a natural rather than industrial motif.