apt building off 94 spitzack woodblock woodcut mokuhanga print printmaking washi seattle art

This print depicts an apartment building observed from the side of a numbered highway, applying mokuhanga technique to vernacular American architecture. The subject — a residential structure viewed from a roadway — departs from the landscape and floral motifs traditionally associated with Japanese woodblock printing, instead translating water-based printing into the geometric repetition of multi-unit housing. The flat color planes characteristic of mokuhanga lend themselves to architectural subjects, where blocks of unmodulated color register as windows, siding, and shadowed recesses. Bokashi gradations may articulate the play of light across facades or the haze of distance from a passing vantage point. Spitzack's choice of urban subject matter aligns with a broader tendency in contemporary American mokuhanga, where practitioners trained in the Japanese tradition apply its tools to Western environments. Hand-burnished with a baren onto absorbent washi, the impression carries the soft tonal quality of water-based pigments. The print situates Spitzack within a regional school of Pacific Northwest printmakers translating observation of the built environment through hand-cut blocks.