Biography
Ken Januski is a Philadelphia-based artist and birder whose mokuhanga woodblock prints of wildlife observed in the field have made him a distinctive voice at the intersection of printmaking and natural history art. After spending his undergraduate and graduate years focused on painting, working first in acrylic for about a decade and then in oil for several more years, Januski turned to hand-printed prints when a move to a home with only a small studio made his large-scale paintings impractical.
He began experimenting with relief printmaking, including linocuts, around 2010, and later moved to woodblock printing, finding that the gentler surface of the wood block suited his sensibility, especially when coupled with water-soluble inks. By 2017, mokuhanga had become his primary medium, and all of his artwork is based on birds and other wildlife that he has personally observed and often sketched in the field.
Januski's commitment to direct observation sets his work apart within the mokuhanga community, where landscape and abstraction tend to dominate. His prints capture the specific gestures and habitats of North American bird species with a fidelity that reflects years of dedicated birding, while the mokuhanga technique brings a softness and luminosity to the imagery that distinguishes it from conventional wildlife illustration.
He has exhibited his mokuhanga work internationally, including at the Sumi-Fusion Exhibition at the International Mokuhanga Conference in Nara, Japan in 2021, and at the juried exhibition of the International Mokuhanga Conference in 2024. His work has also been shown regularly in 'The Natural Eye,' the annual exhibition of the Society of Wildlife Artists in London, where he has been selected in 2011, 2012, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023. He sells his prints through his Etsy shop, ArtBirdsNature.
Key Facts
- Nationality
- 🇺🇸United States
- Movement
- Contemporary Mokuhanga
- Works Indexed
- 1
Frequently Asked Questions
Ken Januski is a Philadelphia-based artist and birder whose mokuhanga woodblock prints of wildlife observed in the field have made him a distinctive voice at the intersection of printmaking and natural history art. After spending his undergraduate and graduate years focused on painting, working first in acrylic for about a decade and then in oil for several more years, Januski turned to hand-printed prints when a move to a home with only a small studio made his large-scale paintings impractical.
Ken Januski's work was shaped by the Contemporary Mokuhanga tradition in Japanese woodblock printmaking. Contemporary Mokuhanga: Contemporary mokuhanga (literally "wood-block print") encompasses artists working from approximately 1970 to the present who continue or reinvent traditional Japanese woodblock printing techniques.