Road

Road belongs to a sequence of mokuhanga in which Ono returned repeatedly to the motif of a Tokyo thoroughfare, treating the same subject as a graphic problem to be reworked through successive cuttings. The print likely presents a receding street flanked by low buildings, telephone poles, or wooden fencing, organized around the strong perspectival pull characteristic of his urban work. Ono favored densely cut keyblocks pulled with a baren onto absorbent washi, leaving the carved grain visible in broad passages of black. Within the sosaku-hanga ethic of jiga, jikoku, jizuri, the artist designed, carved, and printed each impression himself, treating the road as a secular meisho-e — a place of working life rather than scenic celebration. The image continues the documentary sympathy for the ordinary city that Ono had developed in the leftist-leaning prints of the 1930s, now translated into a calmer postwar idiom.