Wave

A study of moving water rendered in mokuhanga, this print belongs to a small group in which Ono turned from his characteristic urban and industrial subjects toward the natural world. The treatment of waves in sosaku-hanga differs markedly from the patterned crests of Edo-period ukiyo-e: rather than codifying the wave into the linear vocabulary perfected by Hokusai, Ono works through the carved block itself, allowing the gouge marks and grain of the woodblock to suggest the irregularity and weight of water. As a self-carving, self-printing (jiga, jikoku, jizuri) artist of the creative print movement, Ono treated each block as a record of the hand, and seascape subjects gave him a vehicle for testing how flat tonal areas, perhaps achieved through bokashi gradations, register against the directional cuts of foam and trough. The print sits within his postwar output, when his palette and subject matter broadened from the stark black-and-white industrial scenes of the 1930s into a more meditative range of landscape and water motifs.