Hanga
Abstract illustration of a woman with colorful, spiky hair, wearing glasses, with a parrot perched on her shoulder, set against a turquoise background. by Charles Spitzack — Japanese woodblock print

Abstract illustration of a woman with colorful, spiky hair, wearing glasses, with a parrot perched on her shoulder, set against a turquoise background.

by Charles Spitzack

Description

A stylized female figure with multicolored, spiky hair and glasses, a parrot perched on her shoulder, set against a flat turquoise ground. Each color area — hair, skin, eyewear, parrot plumage, background field — likely required its own carved block, registered against the kentō to maintain alignment across successive passes. The flat planar treatment, sharp color edges, and contour-led drawing place the work in dialogue with bijin-ga, the woodblock tradition of female portraiture associated with Utamaro and his successors, while the idiom remains contemporary rather than historicizing. The parrot introduces a kacho-e element to the figure study, combining the bird-and-flower genre with portraiture in a way that historical ukiyo-e tended to keep separate. The print demonstrates Spitzack's handling of the human face within mokuhanga's structural constraints — limited gradients, hard color edges, and reliance on outline drawing for descriptive specificity.

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Abstract illustration of a woman with colorful, spiky hair, wearing glasses, with a parrot perched on her shoulder, set against a turquoise background. was created by Charles Spitzack.

Abstract illustration of a woman with colorful, spiky hair, wearing glasses, with a parrot perched on her shoulder, set against a turquoise background. depicts abstract.