Five pines

"Five pines" presents a grouping of five pine trees, a subject rooted in the long Japanese tradition of pine imagery — matsu carrying associations of longevity, endurance, and the New Year — but recast in Hiratsuka's vigorous [sosaku-hanga](/glossary/sosaku-hanga) idiom. The composition likely shows the trunks rising from the lower edge of the sheet with their angular branches splayed across the upper register, the dark masses of needle clusters cut as solid blocks against unprinted washi. Where [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) and [shin-hanga](/glossary/shin-hanga) renderings of pines often relied on multiple color blocks and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradation to suggest atmosphere, Hiratsuka's treatment compresses the subject to incised black contour and flat black-and-white relationships. The number five may reference a specific named grove or simply describe the arrangement on the sheet. As a hand-printed mokuhanga in the sosaku-hanga tradition, the work was entirely self-produced — Hiratsuka drawing on the block, carving with a knife, and pulling the impression with a [baren](/glossary/baren) on washi. It belongs alongside his studies of single elements of the Japanese landscape: a stone lantern, a temple gate, a roadside Jizō, each treated with concentrated carving.