The road to Pompei

A view along an approach to the Roman archaeological site in southern Italy, drawn from Ono's European travels. After the 1950s, many sosaku-hanga artists traveled abroad and incorporated foreign subjects into their work, treating European landscapes through the formal vocabulary of Japanese woodblock rather than abandoning it for Western pictorial conventions. Ono's road to Pompei likely organizes the composition around a receding diagonal, with the volcanic terrain or stone-walled approach providing flat zones for woodgrain texture and bokashi gradation toward the horizon. His technical training in the Onchi tradition emphasized the carved block as an expressive surface in its own right, so even foreign architectural subjects retained the visible chisel marks and registration habits central to his prints of Tokyo workers two decades earlier. This first version in a small group on the same motif suggests Ono returned to the subject to test variations of color, key block, and impression density.