Damian Hirst, British contemporary artist art collector, entrepreneur, photographed in his Soho, Studio in London, United Kingdom

The portrait shows Damian Hirst photographed in his Soho studio in London, the working environment of an artist whose own practice has long made use of industrial process and serial production. Artz translates the documentary photograph into mokuhanga by separating the image into discrete color blocks, carving each by hand, and printing them in registration onto [washi](/glossary/washi) with the [baren](/glossary/baren). Studio backgrounds — shelves, walls, fragments of ongoing work — are simplified into broad planes, while the figure is modeled through layered impressions and [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) where soft transitions are required. As elsewhere in this series, the technical translation from photograph to woodblock is itself part of the subject: a contemporary art-world figure rendered in a centuries-old printmaking technique, with the slower temporality of the cut block standing against the rapid circulation of contemporary art imagery. The Craftspeople tag on the work is consistent with Artz's interest in sitters defined by their hands-on practice.