flower woodcut print with ant by contemporary visual artist and printmaker charles spitzack living and working in his studio in Seattle WA

A botanical study showing a single flower with an ant resting on or near its surface, made at Spitzack's Seattle studio. The pairing of flora with insect locates the print within the kacho-e lineage, which historically encompassed insects and small fauna alongside avian subjects — Hokusai's botanical studies and Hiroshi Yoshida's later flower prints both treated small creatures as scale-giving compositional anchors. The ant supplies a focal contrast against the larger floral form, anchoring the eye and establishing relative scale within an otherwise close-range composition. Producing the print as mokuhanga on washi requires separate blocks for each color, applied with hand pressure through a baren onto the dampened sheet. As a Seattle-based printmaker, Spitzack participates in a Pacific Northwest mokuhanga community whose proximity to Japan — through trade routes, artist exchanges, and academic programs — has shaped the medium's regional development since the late twentieth century.