The thirteenth child born into a family of silk weavers, Kazuyuki Ohtsu (Japanese, b. 1935) began studying traditional woodblock printmaking in Tokyo at the age of eighteen. For forty years Ohtsu served as an assistant to Kiyoshi Saito, a woodblock artist at the forefront of the sōsaku hanga movement, before working on his own. Breaking with the traditional division of labor practiced by Hiroshige, Hokusai, and virtually every other Japanese printmaker who preceded them, the sōsaku hanga (creative print) artists handled every step of print production—they painted the original pictures, carved the woodblocks, and printed the images.
In Ohtsu’s perfectly balanced compositions we discover places nearly forgotten, tranquil scenes of natural beauty and harmony. His prints forsake an earlier period’s use of strong outlines to rely on rich, elemental colors to depict the countryside of Japan.
Contains five each of the following notecards:
Red Camellia
Bamboo in Summer