up high spitzack woodblock woodcut mokuhanga print printmaking washi seattle art artist

"Up High" suggests an elevated vantage point or upward gaze, a compositional choice that suits the flat-plane logic of mokuhanga particularly well. Water-based pigments brushed onto cherry blocks and pulled by hand with a baren produce broad, even color fields that read clearly when stacked vertically, and the medium's capacity for bokashi gradients lends itself to skies, distances, and the soft transitions between near and far that an aerial or upward view requires. Working on absorbent washi rather than the sized papers of Western relief printing, Spitzack joins a generation of American practitioners who treat mokuhanga as a primary medium rather than a stylistic exercise. His recognition at the 2024 International Mokuhanga Conference in Echizen places this body of work within a sustained transpacific dialogue, and prints like this one suggest the way contemporary mokuhanga artists carry the perspectival flexibility of historical meisho-e into wholly modern subject matter and pictorial language.