Abstract illustration of a woman with colorful, spiky hair, wearing glasses, with a parrot perched on her shoulder, set against a turquoise background.
- Image courtesy of
- Artist website (Charles Spitzack)
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](/glossary/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](/glossary/kacho-e) element to the figure study, combining the bird-and-flower genre with portraiture in a way that historical [ukiyo-e](/glossary/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.
Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)
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.
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