Setting sun

Setting sun shifts Ono's habitual industrial and documentary register toward the atmospheric, organizing the composition around the tonal event of a low sun behind landscape or built form. Sosaku-hanga artists used bokashi — the gradient achieved by working pigment with a wet brush across the block before printing — to render exactly this kind of softened sky, and the technique would likely structure the upper portion of the sheet against a more sharply carved silhouette below. Ono's handling of black across his career, from the stark factory prints of the 1930s onward, gives him the vocabulary to set a darkened foreground mass against the graduated light of the sky without sentimentality. The subject sits within a long lineage of evening prints in Japanese woodblock practice, from Hiroshige's twilight stations to the sosaku-hanga generation's more subjective treatments, and Ono's version belongs to the latter: an evening as observed and felt rather than as a fixed seasonal type.