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](/glossary/washi) as the receptive substrate and the [baren](/glossary/baren) as the burnishing tool produces softer tonal transitions than European woodcut, and contemporary practitioners often exploit [bokashi](/glossary/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](/glossary/bijin-ga) or [yakusha-e](/glossary/yakusha-e).