Lake Kizaki

Lake Kizaki is the largest of the Nishina Three Lakes in Nagano Prefecture, set against the foothills of the Northern Alps. Hiratsuka's print likely renders the lake's surface and surrounding mountains in his black-and-white woodcut style, using the grain of the cherry block to suggest water texture and the density of forested slopes. As a sosaku-hanga artist, he cut, designed, and pulled the impression himself on washi, abandoning the multi-block color registration of traditional nishiki-e in favor of tonal opposition. Landscape subjects like Lake Kizaki belong to the meisho-e tradition that runs through Japanese printmaking from Hokusai and Hiroshige onward, though Hiratsuka strips away the decorative palette to emphasize structural form. The reduced range focuses attention on the carved line and the relationship of dark mass to negative space, qualities that recur across his eight-decade body of work.