Record of My Crop

The title positions the print as a personal still life, an inventory of vegetables or fruit raised by the artist himself. Domestic subjects of this kind were central to sosaku-hanga, where everyday life was treated as legitimate material for fine printmaking and the diary-like first person ("my crop") was used without irony. Inagaki's still-life prints generally arrange a small group of objects against a flat ground, the forms outlined in firm key blocks and filled with uninflected color, occasionally softened by a thin bokashi at an edge. The mokuhanga technique, with its layering of pigments brushed onto carved cherry blocks and pressed into washi by baren, lends an even, slightly absorbent surface that suits the subject's understatement. Such works sit alongside his cat compositions as part of a broader interest in the contents of the printmaker's own household — animals, harvests, tools, rooms — surveyed in a graphic, anti-monumental register.