man with stick spitzack woodblock woodcut mokuhanga print printmaking washi seattle art artist

A figure study depicting a male subject holding a stick or staff, rendered in the water-based mokuhanga technique that distinguishes Spitzack's American practice from Western oil-based relief printmaking. The subject likely fills the composition with the stick functioning as a vertical compositional element, a strategy long employed in Japanese figure prints where verticality structures the picture plane. Mokuhanga's reliance on washi as the receptive substrate and the baren as the burnishing tool produces softer tonal transitions than European woodcut, and contemporary practitioners often exploit bokashi gradations for atmospheric or sculptural effect on figures. Spitzack's recognition at the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen places him within a growing cohort of American artists who have adopted mokuhanga as a sustained studio practice rather than a workshop curiosity, and figure studies of this kind typify the genre experimentation common among Western mokuhanga practitioners working outside the historical categories of bijin-ga or yakusha-e.