Homage to boxwood

This print pays tribute to tsuge (boxwood), a dense, fine-grained wood long used in Japanese craft for cutting seals, netsuke, and combs. For Hiratsuka, who insisted on cutting his own blocks, the choice to honor a carving wood reflects the sosaku-hanga ethos in which the material substrate of the print is inseparable from its meaning. The image likely depicts a boxwood specimen—its dense foliage and gnarled trunk—rendered in the artist's characteristic black-and-white woodcut idiom of bold contour and sculptural mass. By dedicating a print to the very kind of wood under his knife (or to the closely related cherry block he typically used for printing), Hiratsuka draws explicit attention to the relationship between subject and tool that defined his practice. He produced a number of works that thematize craft materials and processes, all consistent with his lifelong advocacy for the artist's direct engagement with carving and printing rather than the divided labor of the ukiyo-e workshop.