Sea birds

Another in Ono's sustained series of seabird subjects, this print likely repeats the motif with variation in arrangement, palette or block layering. Sosaku-hanga artists frequently revisited a single subject across multiple prints as a formal investigation rather than as commercial editioning, treating each impression as a discrete made object. Ono — who as both practitioner and historian published the standard Japanese-language history of the creative print movement, Nihon hanga undō shi — was acutely conscious of the tradition he worked within, and his seabird prints engage the kacho-e lineage while setting aside its decorative conventions. The hand-rubbed impression on washi typically yields a surface where the grain of the cherry block remains legible in passages of flat tone, a textural quality that distinguishes mokuhanga from mechanical reproduction and that Ono cultivated throughout his five-decade printmaking practice.