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](/glossary/washi) with a [baren](/glossary/baren), with [kento](/glossary/kento) registration holding the layers in alignment. The continuous tonal range of the photograph is reduced into flat color shapes joined by [bokashi](/glossary/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.