"Berkeley ca" California bay area woodcut print fine art printmaking contemporary art made at the kala art institute woodblock of palm trees mountains bushes by contemporary American artist Charles Spitzack

A California landscape combining palm trees, distant mountains, and intervening bushes — a configuration recognizable as the East Bay terrain visible from Berkeley. The print was made at the Kala Art Institute, a Berkeley print studio that hosts visiting and resident artists working across intaglio, lithography, and relief methods. The subject sits within the meisho-e tradition of named-place prints, transposed from Edo-period travel views to a contemporary American setting. Stacking palms against mountain ridges produces layered color planes, each likely cut as a separate block and registered with kentō notches at the sheet edges. The spatial logic — foreground plants, flattened middle ground, distant peaks — echoes compositional strategies used by Hokusai in his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and by Hiroshige in his Tokaido series, though the local subject and contemporary palette mark the print as Spitzack's own contribution to American mokuhanga landscape.