flower woodcut print with ant by contemporary visual artist and printmaker charles spitzack living and working in his studio in Seattle WA
- Image courtesy of
- Artist website (Charles Spitzack)
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](/glossary/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](/glossary/washi) requires separate blocks for each color, applied with hand pressure through a [baren](/glossary/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.
Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)
flower woodcut print with ant by contemporary visual artist and printmaker charles spitzack living and working in his studio in Seattle WA was created by Charles Spitzack.
flower woodcut print with ant by contemporary visual artist and printmaker charles spitzack living and working in his studio in Seattle WA depicts birds & flowers and craftspeople.
