Andrew O Hagan

A mokuhanga portrait of the Scottish novelist and essayist Andrew O'Hagan, drawn from Andrea G. Artz's photographic source and reworked through the layered registration of Japanese water-based woodblock printing. O'Hagan's writing moves between fiction, long-form reportage, and ghostwritten memoir, and Artz's portrait method — which strips the figure from any indicating context — leaves the face to carry the work alone. The image is built from multiple color blocks carved into shina plywood, inked with water-based pigments, and pulled onto dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) using a [baren](/glossary/baren), with [kento](/glossary/kento) marks at the corner of each block keeping the layers in register. The translation from photograph to woodblock obliges the continuous tones of the source to be resolved into a smaller vocabulary of flat colored areas softened by [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradients. The print belongs to Artz's wider series of contemporary cultural figures across literature, performance, design, and visual art, in which the slowness and physicality of mokuhanga is brought to bear on lens-based portrait imagery.