Town

Medium:: Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)
Image courtesy of: Saru Gallery

Description

Town presents a section of Tokyo in the unhierarchical, close-packed manner characteristic of Ono's urban sheets — rooftops, signage, utility poles, and modest buildings stacked into a single shallow space. The print would be built from a dominant black keyblock cut with deliberate roughness, supplemented by one or two flat color blocks in subdued tones. Ono printed his own editions in the sosaku-hanga manner, pulling each impression with a baren on washi rather than delegating to professional carvers and printers as the older ukiyo-e workshops had done. The image continues the documentary attention to working-class districts that ran through his 1930s output, by then softened into a less polemical record of the postwar city. Town reads as a generic meisho-e of no particular meisho — the unmonumental neighborhood treated as worthy of careful description.