capture the flag spitzack woodblock woodcut mokuhanga print printmaking washi seattle art

A title invoking the children's outdoor game of opposing teams, base camps, and territorial flags suggests a narrative or figural subject rather than a pure landscape. Mokuhanga adapts to figurative work through carefully registered key-blocks for outline and successive color blocks for fill — a discipline visible in the technical control Spitzack has demonstrated at the international level. The water-based pigments allow textile-like flatness in clothing or flag fabric, while [bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) can suggest grass underfoot, a twilight sky, or the haze of motion. American mokuhanga practitioners like Spitzack often gravitate toward subjects drawn from local lived experience — a methodological extension of how Hokusai or Hiroshige treated their own contemporary world. The choice to render a backyard or schoolyard pastime in this labor-intensive medium reframes the everyday as worthy of the slow, deliberate attention mokuhanga demands. This work belongs to the contemporary Seattle output that situates Spitzack within the growing American mokuhanga movement.