Riverbank

The companion Riverbank sheet, treating the same subject as an independent composition. Ono's repetition of titles — multiple Wind prints, paired Riverbank prints — reflects a working method in which a motif is investigated across several blocks rather than resolved in a single design, an approach consistent with the sosaku-hanga emphasis on the print as personal artistic statement. A riverbank subject offers natural compositional clarity: a horizontal division of the sheet, water against earth, with the carving rhythm of each zone supplying most of the visual incident. Cut on the side grain in the Japanese mokuhanga tradition and printed on washi with a baren, such a print preserves the texture of the woodblock as part of its surface. Ono was simultaneously one of the most prolific historians of the creative-print movement and one of its long-serving practitioners, and these quiet landscape sheets sit at some distance from the politically charged urban prints with which he began his career in the 1930s.