Faith Stone

Faith Stone is an American mokuhanga printmaker whose work preserves and revitalizes the tradition of Buddhist woodblock printing within the contemporary mokuhanga movement. She divides her time between Colorado and Hawaii, and it was on Hawaii's Big Island that she took up mokuhanga, creating American Buddhist art through the traditional Japanese method of hand-carved and hand-printed woodblock prints.

Stone's path to mokuhanga began with a fortuitous discovery: the Donkey Mill Art Center, co-founded by master printmaker Hiroki Morinoue, was located just ten minutes from her Big Island home. When she visited and told Morinoue she had been searching for a mokuhanga teacher for years, he agreed to take her on as a student. Under his guidance, she developed the technical skills and philosophical understanding that now inform her distinctive practice.

Her prints feature Buddhist and Hindu deities, goddesses, and spiritual imagery rendered through mokuhanga, connecting her work to the long tradition of devotional woodblock printing in Asia. Subjects include goddesses such as Tara - among them a Black Tara - and Saraswati, alongside other Buddhist and Hindu deities, often incorporating Hawaiian natural imagery and tropical landscapes. This fusion of Asian spiritual iconography with Hawaiian elements reflects her distinctive position as a practitioner of an ancient Asian art form who works between the American mainland and the Pacific.

Stone's current artistic mission is to preserve the Buddha woodblock tradition, a once-thriving discipline within mokuhanga that she sees as at risk of being lost. She has taken part in the International Mokuhanga Conference juried exhibitions in Nara (2021) and Echizen (2024) - the latter with a mokuhanga portrait of her teacher, Hiroki Morinoue - and teaches mokuhanga workshops alongside Morinoue through the Honolulu Printmakers organization. She sells her prints through her Etsy shop, FaithStoneArt.