David Lindo, Urban Birder on Tower 42

This mokuhanga portrait depicts the writer and broadcaster David Lindo, known as the Urban Birder, photographed atop Tower 42 in the City of London. The setting — a 183-metre skyscraper completed in 1980 — places the sitter within one of London's principal raptor-watching points, where peregrine falcons regularly hunt over the financial district. Artz translates her photographic portrait of Lindo into water-based woodblock print on [washi](/glossary/washi), using hand-carved blocks impressed with a [baren](/glossary/baren). The elevated urban vantage and the figure of the observer recall [meisho-e](/glossary/meisho-e) conventions of significant viewing places, transposed to contemporary London. The mokuhanga process reduces photographic detail to flatter colour fields, foregrounding the sitter's silhouette against sky and architecture. Within Artz's portrait practice, the Lindo print is part of a wider engagement with named subjects whose identities are tied to specific London locations, examining how the figure inhabits and shapes the city around it through a print medium that requires sustained, slow material engagement.