Margaret Kilgallan

A mokuhanga portrait of the American painter and printmaker Margaret Kilgallen, associated with the San Francisco Mission School and who died in 2001. Kilgallen's own work drew on hand-painted signage, folk lettering, and the visual language of itinerant labor, and the affinity with traditional craft printing makes her a fitting subject for Artz's translation from photograph into woodblock. The print reduces the photographic likeness — necessarily drawn from an image taken during her lifetime — to a small number of discrete color layers carved into shina plywood and pulled onto dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) using a [baren](/glossary/baren) and water-based pigments. [Kento](/glossary/kento) marks at the corner and edge of each block carry registration through successive passes, while [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradients can soften the transition between flat colored areas. Artz's portraits typically isolate the sitter against a planar background so that the materiality of the paper and the cut of the block become as legible as the face itself. The image belongs to a wider series in which Artz portrays figures from visual art, performance, design, and literature.