Lorena Herrero

A portrait print bearing the sitter's name, "Lorena Herrero" extends Andrea G. Artz's translation of photographic portraiture into mokuhanga, the Japanese water-based woodblock tradition. Trained originally as a portrait photographer, Artz works from photographic source material that she reduces to discrete tonal layers, each carved into a separate block of cherry or shina wood. The successive impressions — built up on [washi](/glossary/washi) through hand-pressure with a [baren](/glossary/baren) — accumulate into a likeness rather than reproduce one outright. Water-based pigments permit the soft, breathing transitions associated with [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi), where the carver's brush charges the block with a graded wash before each pull. In Artz's portraits, this allows skin and hair to be registered as planes of subtly modulated tone rather than line. The single-name title locates the work within an extended series of named sitters, paralleling the cohort of three-dimensional photographic portraits that anchors her installation practice. Where those folded paper figures occupy actual space, the woodblock variants flatten the same act of attention onto a sheet, retaining the indexical pull of the photographic source while routing it through a centuries-old process of carving, inking, and registration.