River

A second River composition, indicating Ono's habit of returning to a motif across multiple blocks rather than treating each subject as a one-off. Sosaku-hanga artists frequently worked in informal series, and Ono in particular reused riverine and waterfront subjects to test different framings of the same modern landscape. The print is executed in mokuhanga with hand-cut blocks and baren-burnished impressions on washi, and its visual logic likely depends on the contrast between the dense black of carved areas and the warm tone of the paper. Compared to a companion River sheet, this version may shift viewpoint, season, or activity along the bank — boats versus bridge, near view versus distant span — while preserving the same reductive vocabulary of silhouette and negative space. Such variation places Ono in the broader Onchi-circle practice of using the woodblock as a sketching instrument, and his rivers form part of a sustained record of the working waterways that knit prewar and postwar Tokyo and its hinterland together.