Stairs

This second treatment of the Stairs subject indicates Ono returned to the motif more than once, a working method common among sosaku-hanga artists who saw each block as the basis for sustained variation rather than a single definitive image. The version likely differs from its companion in viewpoint, cropping, or the balance of carved positive and negative space — small changes that produce a markedly different reading of the same architectural element. Ono carved his own blocks and printed his own editions, so each Stairs is a discrete object rather than a reissue. The mokuhanga technique here would rely on a key block carrying the structural lines, with flat fields of ink rolled or brushed onto the wood and transferred to washi by baren pressure. Within Ono's body of work, paired or serial treatments of urban subjects connect his prewar reportorial impulse to the more formally exploratory printmaking he continued through the postwar decades, where the same staircase could function both as observed fact and as compositional armature.