Damian Hale

Damian Hale is a mokuhanga portrait from Andrea G. Artz's ongoing series rebuilding photographic likenesses through Japanese water-based woodblock printing. The shift from photograph to print demands a deliberate reduction of continuous tone into discrete carved areas: a keyblock typically handles the principal contours of the face, while further blocks carry separate passes of colour, each registered with [kento](/glossary/kento) marks. Water-based pigment mixed with rice paste is brushed onto a dampened block and pulled by [baren](/glossary/baren) onto [washi](/glossary/washi), embedding the pigment in the paper rather than sitting on top of it, with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations used to model the face and hair. The work develops the central concern of Artz's interdisciplinary practice — the human figure as it moves between media — and parallels her three-dimensional folded paper portraits, where flat photographic images become dimensional objects. As with the rest of the series, naming the print after the sitter aligns it with portrait printmaking while the technique draws explicitly on the Japanese woodblock tradition.