Hanga
Girl Combing her hair by Tomikichiro Tokuriki — Japanese Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)

Girl Combing her hair

by Tomikichiro Tokuriki

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

Description

This second impression of the comb subject represents a variant within Tokuriki's recurring exploration of a single domestic motif, a practice common among sosaku-hanga artists who treated repeat subjects as opportunities to test color combinations and printing variants. The girl, focused inward on the act of grooming, presents an introspective counterpoint to the meisho-e subjects that dominated his commercial output. Treatments of this kind rely on careful registration to align the small comb against the dark hair mass, and on the contrast between the figure's worked surface and the flat plane of the surrounding paper. The carving of the hair employs short parallel cuts to suggest individual strands, while the kimono pattern is rendered through separate color blocks in the registered nishiki-e tradition. As with much sosaku-hanga figural work from the postwar decades, the subject combines references to classical bijin-ga compositions with a simplified, modern handling — Tokuriki was teaching at the Kyoto School of Painting through this period, and his pedagogical interest in figure construction shows through.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Girl Combing her hair was created by Tomikichiro Tokuriki (徳力富吉郎).

Girl Combing her hair depicts children.