Combing The Hair

Combing the Hair is among the bijin-ga subjects that most directly engaged Kotondo's technical abilities as a draftsman and the collaborative skill of his carvers and printers. The kamisuki moment — a woman mid-toilette, arranging or drawing a comb through unbound hair — allowed Kotondo to exploit the woodblock medium's capacity for rendering fine parallel lines in hair, the soft gradations of skin through bokashi, and the patterned complexity of kimono fabric, all within a single image. The woman's exposed nape and the loose fall of her hair are compositional elements with acknowledged erotic charge in the shin-hanga bijin-ga tradition, presented here with the restraint and refinement that distinguish Kotondo's output from more commercial contemporaries. The print was produced in collaboration with a specialist publisher and carver-printer team following shin-hanga workshop practice.