Tara Chittenden

Tara Chittenden is a portrait print by Andrea G. Artz, executed in mokuhanga, the Japanese water-based woodblock technique. As with others in the artist's portrait series, the image originates in a photographic study and is then separated into colour blocks — typically shina or cherry — that are printed in succession on dampened [washi](/glossary/washi) using water-based pigments and a [baren](/glossary/baren). The kentō registration system aligns each layer precisely. Mokuhanga's pigments penetrate rather than coat the paper, producing a matte surface in which the woodgrain remains faintly visible, and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) gradations are pulled across the blocks by hand for tonal transitions. Within Artz's broader practice, prints of this kind are not always end-points: she has used flat printed portraits as the raw material for folded, three-dimensional paper sculptures and installations, in which the figure is reconstructed in space. Read in that context, Tara Chittenden functions both as a finished portrait in the woodblock tradition and as a possible source-sheet for the artist's sculptural work.