Riverbank

One of two Riverbank prints in Ono's output, this mokuhanga continues his sustained interest in the Japanese river as a structural motif. A riverbank composition concentrates attention on the meeting line between water and land, often staged as a long horizontal with the bank cutting diagonally or running parallel to the lower edge. The carved fields of bank and water tend to be differentiated through cutting direction and density rather than through colour, with the white of the washi reserved as light on water or sky. Ono cut his own blocks and pulled his own impressions in the sosaku-hanga manner championed by Koshiro Onchi and the Ichimoku-kai, and the directness of that process suits a subject of bare embankments and shallow water. The print extends the same engagement with everyday Japanese landscape that ran through his work from the prewar industrial scenes onward, here stripped of human or mechanical incident.