Poppies

A poppy study in mokuhanga, one of several floral subjects in Inagaki's catalog and a counterpoint to the cat imagery for which he is most often remembered. Poppies, with their broad disc-like petals and slender stems, suit his planar approach particularly well: each blossom can be carved as a single mass of saturated color, with the dark center cut as a contrasting block and the stems and leaves left as narrow ribbons against the ground. Color in such prints is typically held flat and unmodulated, with bokashi reserved for selective passages such as the ground or the petal interior. The wood grain of the background block is often left visible, in keeping with sosaku-hanga's preference for foregrounding the matrix rather than concealing it. While poppies do not carry the cultural depth of the chrysanthemum or plum in Japanese visual tradition, the subject gives Inagaki the chance to work with stronger chromatic contrast than his more restrained cat prints typically allow.