purple house spitzack woodblock woodcut mokuhanga print printmaking washi seattle art

"Purple House" depicts a domestic structure rendered in saturated violet, a chromatic choice that places architecture into a register more often reserved for landscape mood-setting than for buildings themselves. Mokuhanga is well suited to this kind of color-forward architectural subject because its layered transparent pigments produce hues with a depth that solid printed ink cannot match — successive impressions on the same [washi](/glossary/washi) sheet build the final purple from underlying blues and reds rather than depositing it as a single opaque layer. [Bokashi](/glossary/bokashi) may be used at the eaves or sky to soften the building's silhouette into its surroundings. Spitzack's Seattle setting offers a vocabulary of Pacific Northwest residential forms — gabled rooflines, painted clapboard, dense plantings — that he translates through Japanese technique. The work continues a thread in his practice of treating familiar American built environments as legitimate mokuhanga subjects.