Untitled

This untitled woodblock by Alex Mankiewicz sits within his contemporary mokuhanga practice, where his formative training as a printmaker in Kyoto continues to shape his approach to image-making. The work is produced through the water-based mokuhanga method, which uses pigment thinned with water and rice paste, applied to dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) paper and burnished by hand with a [baren](/glossary/baren). Unlike oil-based Western relief printing, mokuhanga permits soft tonal gradations and layered transparencies that resist the harder edge of mechanical reproduction. Mankiewicz's prints are recognizable for their graphic compositional sensibility — a directness inherited from his parallel work as an illustrator and graphic narrative artist. Even as a singular image, the print carries the visual logic of a designed page, with figure-ground relationships organized for immediate legibility. The work belongs to a cohort of practitioners using mokuhanga outside its traditional [ukiyo-e](/glossary/ukiyo-e) context, treating the medium as a contemporary graphic vehicle rather than a historicizing one.