Bridget Riley

The print depicts Bridget Riley, the British painter whose work has been associated with Op Art and the systematic use of repeated linear and chromatic structures. Artz's mokuhanga portrait translates a photographic source of Riley into separately carved color blocks, each inked with water-based pigment and printed in registration onto washi with the baren. The pairing of subject and medium is suggestive: Riley's paintings depend on the precise relation of one painted unit to another, while mokuhanga itself depends on the registration of multiple blocks against one another to build a single image. Continuous photographic tone is reduced to discrete planes; bokashi gradients are reserved for those passages where soft transitions are required. As with the other portraits in Artz's series, the print places the sitter within a body of work that treats photography not as a finished image but as source material to be remade by hand, through carving, inking, and the slower temporality of woodblock.