Ruth Blanke

This mokuhanga portrait of Ruth Blanke is printed by hand on [washi](/glossary/washi) using water-based pigments, in the registered woodblock tradition that Artz has integrated into her contemporary portrait practice. The likeness is derived from her own photographic source material and is then reworked through the constraints of the medium: each tone must be cut as a separate block, each colour brushed onto the wood with a small amount of rice paste before being pulled with the [baren](/glossary/baren). [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi), the graduated wash applied directly to the block, allows Artz to retain something of the soft modelling of photographic light across the sitter's face without printing a continuous halftone. The portrait shares the format of the rest of Artz's named series, in which each sitter receives a single sheet rather than being grouped or composited. Read alongside her installation work with three-dimensional folded paper portraits, the print sits as the planar, multipliable register of the same enquiry into how a photographic image can be transferred into hand-worked paper.