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 using a baren and water-based pigments. Kento marks at the corner and edge of each block carry registration through successive passes, while 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.