prussian blue 2025 mountain with moon monochromatic woodcut woodblock print printmaking charles spitzack artist artwork contemporary lino linocut washi

A monochromatic mountain-and-moon composition rendered in Prussian blue, the synthetic pigment known in Japanese as bero-ai that transformed nineteenth-century ukiyo-e printing after its introduction to Japan in the 1820s. Hokusai and Hiroshige both used Prussian blue for landscape series, and Spitzack's choice of a single-pigment palette places this work in dialogue with that meisho-e tradition. The mountain-with-moon motif is an established subject in Japanese landscape printing, and a monochromatic treatment foregrounds tonal gradation — the bokashi technique of graduated inking — over color narrative. Working in a single hue compresses the image to value relationships, requiring careful control of pigment density on the woodblock and even pressure with the baren during printing. The metadata's mention of both woodcut and linocut suggests a hybrid approach, consistent with contemporary mokuhanga practice where artists adapt traditional methods to materials at hand. Within Spitzack's 2025 output, this print stakes out explicitly Japanese-referential ground.