River

A river scene cut as a sosaku-hanga in Ono's characteristic mode of self-carved, self-printed mokuhanga. As with much of his landscape work, the print likely treats the river not as a poetic meisho subject in the lineage of Hiroshige but as a worked, inhabited waterway — an embankment, bridge piers, moored boats, or low industrial buildings reading as flat planes of black against the unprinted washi. Ono favored angular knife-cut contours over the fluid lines of Edo-period ukiyo-e, and his rivers tend to carry the same graphic weight as his factories and streets. The composition would rely on bold tonal blocks rather than nishiki-e color layering, with reserved areas of paper standing in for water and sky. Within his fifty-year output, the river motif recurs as a structural element of the modern Japanese landscape, situating Ono among the Onchi-influenced Ichimoku-kai printmakers who saw mokuhanga as a vehicle for direct, unmediated observation rather than decorative tradition.