Untitled

Before settling between Kyoto and Byron Bay, Alex Mankiewicz lived and worked in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. This international itinerary registers in his prints not as overt subject matter but as a graphic vocabulary — a flexibility of reference that distinguishes his work from mokuhanga produced strictly within a Japanese or Western tradition. The print is made by the standard contemporary mokuhanga process: a keyblock and color blocks carved into wood, water-based pigments worked onto each block with a brush and rice paste, registration achieved through kentō notches at the corner and side of every block, and the impression pulled by hand on dampened [washi](/glossary/washi). What sits inside that technical frame is an image shaped by the artist's editorial illustration practice, where reading the page quickly is the operative requirement. The print uses an old Japanese process to deliver a contemporary graphic image, with no contradiction between the two and no concession to historicism on either side.