River A

Designated 'A' in what was likely a lettered series, this print extends Ono's lifelong engagement with rivers as subject — adjacent to but distinct from his numbered Riverbank prints. The lettering convention suggests a formal sequence in which the artist explored variations of the same compositional problem: the meeting of water and land, treated as an arrangement of planes rather than a topographic record. Printed in mokuhanga from blocks Ono cut and impressed himself, the work depends for its character on the visible labor of those manual operations — the cut edge of the block defining each color shape, the baren leaving its faint circular tracking on broad areas of pigment. River subjects recur throughout Ono's catalogue from the 1930s into the 1980s, often functioning as a counterweight to his more polemical urban-industrial work; the rivers in his later prints carry less of the social-realist charge of the prewar period and more of the contemplative, formally-driven inquiry typical of the postwar sosaku-hanga generation.