Work

Work belongs to the open-ended series of abstract compositions Shinagawa produced alongside his landscape prints, in which the deliberately unspecific title invites the viewer to read the image on purely formal terms. The print likely deploys a small number of registered color blocks against the texture of the carved surface, a method that draws attention to the woodblock's material qualities — the cut of the gouge, the grain of the plank, the absorbency of the washi. Shinagawa carried out every stage of production himself, in keeping with the sosaku-hanga creed of self-drawing, self-carving, and self-printing. Such untitled or generically titled works were common across the creative-print movement from the 1950s onward, when artists including Onchi Kōshirō, Hiratsuka Un'ichi, and Saitō Kiyoshi pushed the medium toward abstraction. Within Shinagawa's catalogue, prints titled simply Work mark the abstract counterweight to his more figurative rural scenes.