Water in Venice

A study of Venetian canal water — focusing on reflection, ripple, or the meeting of water and stone wall rather than a wide harbor view. Mokuhanga is well suited to such a subject: bokashi gradation can carry the tonal shifts of moving water, and the cherry block's carved grain can be exploited to suggest surface movement. Ono had explored similar effects in his Tokyo prints of riverside districts, where the Sumida and its tributaries played much the same role — water as the structural element binding an urban scene together. The composition sits low on the page, the water occupying the dominant area, with architectural elements reduced to dark silhouettes at the upper edge or refracted as broken verticals in the surface. This pared-down, near-abstract observation marks the maturity of Ono's late practice, where his decades of writing on sosaku-hanga history appear to have informed his own compositions — a printmaker's recognition that a single observed effect, fully worked across a small number of blocks, can stand as the whole subject.