Diana Athill

This mokuhanga portrait depicts the British literary editor and memoirist Diana Athill (1917–2019), known for her decades at André Deutsch and for the late-career memoirs that she published into her nineties. Artz works from her own photographic portrait of Athill, transferring the image to carved blocks and printing by hand with a [baren](/glossary/baren) onto [washi](/glossary/washi) using water-based pigments bound with rice paste. The mokuhanga process condenses photographic tonality into bounded colour fields, lending the sitter a stilled, quietly observed presence consistent with Athill's reputation for clear-eyed self-portraiture in prose. Including a writer late in life within the portrait series accords with Artz's interest in named contemporary figures whose work and biography are inseparable. The print sits alongside her portraits of academics, broadcasters and ceramicists, gathering a loose group of cultural sitters mediated through the slow translation of digital photograph into hand-pulled woodblock print on Japanese paper.