Barn Demo 2025 barn and tree on hill farm moon woodcut woodblock print printmaking printmaker charles spitzack artist artwork contemporary lino linocut washi seattle

A rural composition of a barn and tree on a hillside under a moon — the title's "Demo" suggests the print served as a demonstration piece, possibly for one of Spitzack's online workshops referenced in his broader practice. Demonstration prints typically reduce a subject to its essential block separations so that students can follow each printing stage clearly. Barn-tree-hill-moon is a familiar composition in Western pastoral printmaking and adapts cleanly to mokuhanga's separated-color approach: dark silhouette for the barn and tree, mid-tone for the hill, soft graduated ink (bokashi) for the night sky around the moon. The moon is a long-running motif in Japanese printmaking, present in kacho-e (bird-and-flower prints) and in landscape sets like Yoshitoshi's One Hundred Aspects of the Moon. By translating an American rural scene into mokuhanga vocabulary, Spitzack continues the cross-cultural exchange that defines the contemporary American mokuhanga movement — using a Japanese technique to render specifically non-Japanese subject matter.