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](/glossary/bokashi)) for the night sky around the moon. The moon is a long-running motif in Japanese printmaking, present in [kacho-e](/glossary/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.
Mokuhanga (Japanese woodblock)
![Mount Fuji on a Moonlit Night, Kawai Bridge (Tsukiyo no Fuji [Kawaibashi]), from the series "Selection of Views of the Tokaido (Tokaido fukei senshu)" by Kawase Hasui](https://www.artic.edu/iiif/2/d0960668-1e73-339a-b182-fb995a54bff0/full/843,/0/default.jpg)
1947
Color woodblock print; oban
March 1933
Color woodblock print; oban
1919
Color woodblock print
January 1938
Woodblock print, ink and color on paper
Barn Demo 2025 barn and tree on hill farm moon woodcut woodblock print printmaking printmaker charles spitzack artist artwork contemporary lino linocut washi seattle was created by Charles Spitzack.
Barn Demo 2025 barn and tree on hill farm moon woodcut woodblock print printmaking printmaker charles spitzack artist artwork contemporary lino linocut washi seattle depicts moonlight, trees, and village scenes.