Eva Zeisel

A mokuhanga portrait of the Hungarian-American industrial designer Eva Zeisel, who shaped twentieth-century ceramic design across Europe and the United States and worked into her hundreds before her death in 2011. Andrea G. Artz translates a photographic source — likely a late-life portrait, given how often Zeisel was photographed in old age — into the multi-block discipline of Japanese water-based woodblock printing. Each color is carved separately into shina plywood, inked with brushes, and pressed onto dampened washi with a baren, with kento registration holding the layers in alignment. The continuous tonal range of the photograph is reduced into flat color shapes joined by bokashi gradients, so that passages of skin, hair, and clothing read as a small vocabulary of inked planes. Zeisel's own design practice prized organic curve and the sympathetic relationship between hand and object, qualities that find a counterpart in mokuhanga's bodily, slow process. The portrait sits within Artz's broader series of contemporary cultural figures.